The wheels have arrived, so lets get on with the fitting.

The wheels arrived in 2 days which is great service from 4×4 Tyres, I also ordered a set of locking nuts and new lug nuts for the wheels.

I had already ordered the tyres from New Milton Tyres, a local business just down the road, £147.50 each fitted for the AT2’s – cheaper than any online quote and no carriage. However, the AT2’s were coming the end of there production run with the AT3 now available. So I took the wheels down that afternoon to be fitted. It turned out that the 285/75’s for some reason do not have the lettering in white on the sidewalls – a bit of a shame but one less thing to keep clean and maintain!

On returning home I rolled one wheel out and placed it next to the car to see what it looked like…………..Well, it looked massive………….

For a moment I thought I had got my calculations wrong, but then I put it down to an optical illusion, because the new wheel was not in situ.

So to work! The Perentie is a heavy old vehicle and I had ordered online a 3 ton trolley jack. I write this during the lock down, so nothing open locally. Anyway the promised next day delivery was not forthcoming, only an e-mail saying it would be 10 days or more – thats Euro Car Parts for you – not impressed. So, I pulled out the 4 Ton bottle jack that had been sitting in the shed for years and used that, sat on a couple of bricks. It worked fine, straight onto an axle stand and a small trolly jack under the diff as insurance………

Then I sorted out everything that I would need to remove the Boost Alloys, clean up and install the new wheels – with everything to hand, the vehicle would have less time in the air!

So off with the first wheel, no problem there. Thankfully no problem with removing the spacers either, whoever had put them on had done a proper job with Copper Ease. Just 5 lug nuts to undo.

Although the wheels will be off again for the Suspension upgrade fairly soon, it was worth doing a clean up with a wire brush and some brake cleaner.

So then is on with the new rim, these things are heavy and I wanted to be sure that I could do a tyre change on my one – just in case. It was actually much easier than I thought, I had jacked the vehicle up just enough, so I did not have to lift the wheel too high, so it was a simple process of lining up the studs, lifting the wheel to rest on the hub and then lifting it on to the studs – then nuts on, down on the ground, tighten everything up and stand back to admire!

Repeat three more times and everything is looking good – very smart.

I will have to replace the wheel arch extensions with something a bit wider as the 8 inch rims give a slightly wider stand than the 7’s with the spacers. (See previous posts). I don’t think it would be an MOT fail, but the tyres will certainly throw plenty of road muck up the side of the vehicle if I leave it as it is.

Also some covers for the wheels nuts

I will probably get the Britpart ones, rather than some of the other very expensive aftermarket options.