I took a 2hr jaunt to raceways in burton-opon-trent (http://www.raceways.co.uk) to pick them up and I have to say they are such a friendly bunch of people there.

I highly recommend raceways if you need to import any american wheels as they deliver great service, are very reasonably priced and I got my wheels delivered in under a Month!

They also do diecast models, clothing, helmets, seats, steering wheels and other bits.

Anway, enough about them, here’s my new set:

I’ll post some more images when I get them shod over the next few weeks.

My first choice wheel is available with a 6 stud pattern (and 6 spoke design) in a 6*139.7 fitment, so I went ahead and ordered the wheels today from raceways (http://www.raceways.co.uk) .

To show my lack of design skills, here’s an image of my old car with these wheels on to give a rough idea of how they will look.

I’ve also re-checked the stud patterns available for my chosen wheels and there is a strange size which may just squeeze onto a blank beetle disc.
They are 5*135 and the standard PCD for a beetle is 4*130, so it’s only 2.5mm extra radius. I reckon if I get blank discs, studs could be squeezed in at this diameter. If so, I could go with much larger wheels in my chosen design for the car. Upto 16″ or maybe even 17″.

I will speak to Machine7 this week about this idea and depending on the outcome an order for wheels will be placed with reaceways soon after.

I have found the internet is the best source for this as here in the UK we are very restricted with big off road 4×4 or real-wheel drive wheels which have a usable stud pattern.

Some of the designs I considered are as follows:

But I have restricted my decision to the following 2 designs both as it happens from Panther wheels in the USA

At this stage, I think the ‘flower’ design ones are my favourite

I have also been making sure that the wheels will actually fit to the car. Ideally, wheels want to have a stud pattern of 4*130 to stick straight onto a beetle, but this size is extremely rare with big wheels.

The next option is to see what custom discs are available for different fitments. An ideal place for this is Machine7 (http://www.machine7.co.uk) who supply custom discs exactly for this reason.

For american wheels, the best pattern to go for is chevy 5 stud (5*120.65) and luckily both wheel designs have a range including this size.

Something had been bothering me about the design of my first choice wheel:

The picture shown has a 6-stud pattern and I can’t quite see how a 5-stud would work.
After some more investigation online, it transpires that the wheel has a different design for 5-stud, which in my opinion is nowhere near as nice as the 6-stud.

This has made my mind up for me, I will be going for my 2nd choice of wheel from Panther (EMR-359), but unfortunately I will have to go with a 15″ diameter on all sides as this is the only size they do with a chevy stud pattern.

To really set it all off, we also needed some wheels!
After spending many hours on the internet, we decided to import some centerlines from america with a very modern look.

These took nearly 6 Months to arrive (the usual story of a company waiting for enough orders to do a run) and they were well worth the cost of just over £1000 (without rubber!)