^^@1engineer !! Properly installed ! Had them on 05 for over 30k NEVER a problem , stay on top of them . 5k later on 11' no problem !

Have you ever broken a wheel going down the highway? I've never done it on the road. In my opinion actually breaking a wheel is extremely unlikely to cause a dangerous situation. Every time I've broken a wheel it was offroad at slow speed and was immediately obvious. I just don't think that's a real concern when evaluating safety of wheel spacers.

Spacers or wheels coming lose is the danger that I think accounts for 99.9999% of the risk.

Fwiw there should be no shearing force applied to the lugs ever. If there is that means they've come loose. In a shear loading lug nuts wouldn't last very long.

Adding another component like a spacer introduces lots of new variables. If it's like spider Trax for example now your using 3 dissimilar metals. Is expansion and contraction with heat going to cause a greater change in tension on the lugs? Is the spacer uniform in expansion? Because it's not effectively braced by the wheel is it going to expand outward at 600 degrees? By how much? Are the studs embedded in the aluminum spacer going to be as stable as the original ones in steel?

There's a ton of new variables being introduced. Maybe they work. Maybe they don't. I think it's application specific. I don't think breaking a wheel or analysis of that has any value in the question of safety based on my experience of when your likely to have a dangerous failure. At speed when a wheel comes loose.

Ultimately I guess I think their assumption that the spider Trax will not come loose and will remain static with heat and cooling etc is simply wrong. It's making the system less safe by adding more failure possibilities. Is it too dangerous? Probably not. It's it more dangerous? Absolutely.

Interesting..... Haha.

Hey on this topic of spacers....

Is there actually a 5th gen "Wheel/Offset" thread or source for reference that I can read that anyone knows of?

I for one, am of the mindset of less parts, less possible points of failure... But I have NO IDEA what wheel/rim offset would be appropriate for the 5th gen???

Any tips are appreciated.

I got wheel shake while driving and under braking,so I tried to move wheel spacers.Then no shaking.
Buy my friend got a good deal from this site (www.hexautoparts.com) for a set of 4 pieces wheel spacers ,installed them,his car runs well,without any problem.
Not sure why.
Is that possible some wheel spacers are good but some not ?

I have had Spidertrax on our 4th gen for 9 years,130K with no issues. We take it to Discount Tire for rotation and balance and they torque each time. Same on our 5th gen but they have only been on 1 year without issues.


.

Not a fan of spacers, as they can prematurely wear out the wheel bearings, not just cause a risk for the studs.

This is because you're effectively going from a ~1" lever arm to a ~2-3" lever arm on the hub (so over 100% increase).

That said, it might only cause failures at 100k instead of 200k or whatever... and the hubs are built pretty tough... but I just wouldn't want to risk it.

Last thing is that the spacers also increase the effective suspension softness by about 5-10% by making the whole suspension travel a little more exaggerated. This can actually help if the suspension feels stiff, but if it's already soft, it could make it a little wallowy.

Considering a Hub-Centric spacer has quite a lip to overcome before movement off center occurs, if you keep them snug there is little to fear. Wheel bearing won't be loaded any worse than a high offset wheel would do either. Toyota over-builds strength and I doubt the increase in wear will matter.....and history seems to bear that out. Keep the assembly torqued and the paranoia will fade.

I have had 1" spacers on my 2015 for a few years and have not been offroading in over a year. Last week my wife and I were heading out to go grocery shopping and I felt a weird sway in the back so I immediately pulled onto a side street and heard a loud bang.

I started checking the tires because it felt like loose lug nuts. When I got to the last one, left rear, It moved quite a lot. I grabbed the lug wrench and they were all tight. I thought it might be a loose couple of lugs on the spacer. I used the crappy bottle jack to lift the axle enough to remove the wheel and it fell off. All six studs had sheared off.



Loose lugs on the spacer? No all of them were still tight in the spacer.



I am so glad my instincts had me stop when I did so there was no 100Lb tire flying down the street to hurt anyone and no major damage was caused to my vehicle.

I called AAA and requested a flatbed and the guy helped me with a real jack to get three of the lug nuts on enough to hold the tire on to get it on the tow truck and get it home.



Now the fun begins. With the brake drum / disc combo it's a PITA. There is little room to remove the springs that hold the shoes so I only removed one side and rotated 180* to install the other three studs.



I used a small sledge to hammer out the old studs then a combo of large nuts and washers to pull in the new ones with an impact gun.



After the studs were replaced it's fun getting the shoes back in place with no room to use normal tools. (Hint: put the center spring together first then slip the shoe in place.)



The one problem I gave myself is to rotate the axle I had to step on the brake to shift into neutral a few times and it caused the piston on the caliper to pop all the way out ( should have shoved a block of metal in there but did not think about it at the time). I will fix that tomorrow.



After that the rest of the spacers are coming off.

The spacers were properly hand torqued when installed in rechecked a couple of times since then. I also had American Tire hand torque the tires when installed and again when rotated.

In another thread this cost someone $950 to have it done. It only cost me $50 in parts but a lot of work. I am glad I have the tools and knowledge to do it myself.

Wouldn’t the stock studs stick out above the one inch spacer? If so, did your rims have recesses to accommodate that? Reason for asking is that I have seen a failure similar to this if the rim doesn’t sit absolutely flush on the spacer. I know that this guys studs were only a few thousandths of an inch too long.

Moving this from 5th Gen section to General Discussion section so others can maybe learn something from this.

sent the Wife to America's Tire with a note saying put 80 lbs on the lugs...........they balanced all 4 and I pulled out the Torque wrench when She got home, 110 lbs! I backed them off and did them to 80. If they overdo it you get broken studs, DON'T trust them!

If you ask them to hand torque the wheels they will. At least they have for me. I watched them grab a torque wrench.

If you look at the second picture you can see the end of the original wheel studs sit beneath the outer edge of the spacer.

I used an old trick to get the caliper piston back in place. A 5" c-clamp and a piece of scrap steel. This just took a couple minutes including stopping to snap a pic. I did remove the cap on the master cylinder tank first.



I then pulled the other three spacers and it's done.



I know a lot of others have spacers and they usually fail when new or tires have been recently changed. In my case there was no recent activity to cause this making it much more dangerous.