Figuring out the biggest size tire you can fit on your truck isn’t as simple as it might seem. There’s a lot to consider: the size of your rims, your offset, and how your truck is built. With all this in mind, let’s take a look at how big your tires can be.
What’s big?
Before we dive into how you can increase the size of the tires on your truck, it’s important we discuss what we mean by big.
You can get wider tires. You can get taller tires. You can get tires that are wider and taller. That means you need to keep both the section width and the aspect ratio in mind.
Most of the time, when tires are upsized, the upsizing is done using what’s known as the plus one method. You add 10 mm to the width of the tire, and an inch to the diameter of the rim, but reduce the aspect ratio of the tire by 10 points. This leads to the overall diameter of the wheel being the same, but with wider tires that have a reduced sidewall.
You can do this kind of plus sizing until you run out of sidewall. There are advantages and disadvantages to plus sizing.
But that’s not what you’re asking. You want to know the biggest tires you can fit on your truck. That might mean you want a bigger wheel diameter overall, not to be nipping your sidewall to feed tire width.
Let’s find out how you can do it.
Lift kits and bigger tires
There are a lot of reasons people opt to plus size their wheels - but one of the biggest ones is consistency in wheel diameter. When your wheels are too big, they start to rub up against the rest of your truck - and that’s a very bad thing.
That means that if you want to increase the diameter of your wheel, you’re going to need a lift kit. This lift kit can be a body lift kit if you only want to lift your truck a few inches. Suspension lift kits can lift your truck up to a foot.
As you can imagine, lifting your truck up by one foot will allow for much bigger wheels - and much bigger tires. If you’re looking for lift kits in Edmonton, we have a huge variety: Tuff Country, BDS, Zone, and more.
Wheel offset and tire size
The offset of your wheels will have an effect on the maximum size of your tires because it affects the position of your tire in relation to the rest of your vehicle. That means your tires will be nearer (or further) from your suspension or the body of your vehicle.
In other words, when you’re determining the size of tire your vehicle can take, you need to include offset in the calculation.
All of these factors make it difficult to know what size of tire you can fit on your vehicle - that’s why it’s a good idea to talk to the professionals and figure out how you can fit bigger tires on your truck.