How to Properly Install Wheel Spacers on your Vehicle

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I want to talk to you about something super cool. Wheel spacers. Super easy job. I can do it, and you can do it too. They're fairly basic. What it does is it spaces out your wheel. So, in case you went ahead and you did something like this, a nice beautiful fender flare from 1A Auto you'll notice the wheels sunk in a little bit. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't. If you don't get, yourself a spacer. Make sure you get the right measurements and everything because they all come in different lug patterns and different sizes and whatnot. And when you do that, you need to make sure you get one of these, which is a hub centric. That just goes into the back of this, goes right up against the wheel bearing itself and it locks it in nice and firm, so you're not using only your lug nuts to stabilize.

All that said, let's show you how it's done. What we're hoping to do is to go from something like this where it's nice and deep inside there, meh, to something more along the lines of this where we're almost to where it comes out past the fender flare. But of course it doesn't come pass the fender flare. We don't want to be illegal or anything like that. All right. I think that this looks much better. It gives it a much wider stance. It's going to increase stability. I can't wait to get the whole thing done. So, let's do it.

Okay, so the wheels that we're going to be doing, we're going to take off all the lug nuts. You're going to grab your socket, use your ratchet or your air gun, whatever you've got. If you're using an air gun, make sure you're wearing eye protection. We'll set this out of the way. Something that's an absolute must is you have to use threadlocker on your original studs. You can be generous with this. I'm not going to get mad at you. It's not very expensive and it's definitely worth the amount of safety that it's adding. Last thing you want is the lug nuts that hold your spacers to the truck to come loose just because you didn't put on a little bit of threadlocker. I'm going to leave that just like that.

We've got our hub centric here. We have our spacer. It's just going to go in here like this. I'm just going to bonk it in there. There we are. That is the adapter that makes it so it fits directly around this. If you got just the spacers, without the adapter, you can see how big of a hole it has. I'll slide this right over this. You can see that it's sitting right along that, which is perfect because it's going to add structural integrity So, now you're not just going to be holding on by just the lug nuts that are going to be in here. It's very important. It only costs a couple extra bucks and it's worth every cent. Some people will skip right past that part and they're like, "Eh." Don't do it.

Take these lug nuts that came with them. Just going to get that on there. You need to make sure every time you ever take these off, you reapply your threadlocker, okay. If you're checking your brakes, anything that you might do that you would have to take these off, reapply threadlocker. Now what we're going to do is we're going to torque down these lug nuts to the same specification that your manufacturer recommends for torquing on the wheels. If your manufacturer recommends 100 for torquing on your wheels, 100. 125 like this vehicle, 125. Whatever the application may be, that's what you torque those down to. They need to be torqued. I put my bar here. It's going to help keep this from spinning once it gets into the locked position.

Now that we torqued them one time, I'm just going to go around one more time just to be sure. It's a small price to pay for safety. Generally speaking, you want to go in a crisscross pattern. It's a little bit difficult to do when you're using the pry bar method, so I'm going to go with it is what it is and see if I can get this bar situated. All of those are torqued. We're going to do the same to every wheel that we're doing this with. Here we are, friends. We've got our wheel adapters on here. We used the lug nuts that came with the wheel adapters. We used plenty of threadlocker on there. We did not skimp on the threadlocker.

And when we put on the lug nuts, we made sure to torque them to manufacturer specifications. That's the specifications that the truck or the vehicle that you're applying them to asks for to torque the wheels on. Okay. You're going to use the same exact torque specifications. My application was 125 foot pounds. Your vehicle may be different, so don't use the 125. Make sure you go by your vehicle's manufacturer's specifications. We know that we have this nice and tight. Now, it's time to get the wheel on. Grab your wheel, bring it to your leg, give it a nice little lift. You can use your ab muscles. There it is. Grab a couple of these lug nuts. We'll just start them on here for now. Once we have them all started, we'll bottom them out, bring the vehicle down and torque them down.

Time to bottom out these lug nuts. I'm going to use my socket, my air gun, and of course my safety glasses. Now that they're all bottomed out, we'll bring the vehicle down and torque them to manufacturer specifications. Okay, friends. So, now it's time to make sure we torque up our lug nuts. You're going to use the same socket you used to remove the lug nuts and install them. Torque your lug nuts to your manufacturer's specifications. You're going to go in a crisscross pattern. Try to make a nice pretty star.

The reason for going in a crisscross pattern or making a star pattern is just so hopefully the wheel will be sitting perfectly straight up against the spacer there. If you start going just around in a circle, a lot of times what can happen is it can come off kilter a little bit. You think you have it tight, and the torque wrench might even tell you that it's tight by clicking, but then you go head down the road and you hit yourself a bump and everything breaks free. Next thing you know, your lug nuts are coming loose. And I don't want anything bad to happen to any of you. I love you all. Here we go. We've got all of these tight. We're going to do the same to every wheel that we did the wheel spacers on, and then down the road you go. Easy peasy.

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