kudu

Before anyone says this is dumb I'm aware, I just like my little old school wheels. I have a '86 with the factory 5 lug option, while there's nothing wrong with the 5 lug wheel options I'm just personally more of a fan of 80s/90s 4 lug wheels.


Enough reasoning; basically what I'm currently in the process of is figuring out how to 4 lug swap while keeping the 4 pot front calipers and vented rears. From what I've read on the forums from people doing a four lug to five lug swap is for the rear all they're doing is just pressing in a 5 lug hub and swapping on the rotor and piston from a five lug car. This seems like I can just do the reverse and it'll be real straight forward(I'll redrill the rotors to be 4 lug while keeping the same size for the 5 lug).


For the front that's really where I'm trying to figure out, obviously with keeping the five lug caliper and rotors I'll need to keep the knuckle, but have to figure out a solution for the hub. It has been a while since I pulled the hubs off of my car to pack the bearings so I'm trying to figure this out from memory and the small amount of photos online of the hubs. Basically I'm thinking it'll probably either be one of two options, either I'll have to CAD up some new hubs to be exactly the same except it's drilled for 4x114.3 or if there's a way to weld/modify the existing 5 lug hubs to in turn redrill them to be four lug. For having custom hubs machined I do have a connection to someone with a few HAAS machines and would probably be willing to help out with this, but getting the exact dimensions of the hubs will probably be a bit of a process, but the "correct" way to do this. Regarding the modifying the hubs portion I can see there's a few "pockets" on the face that would need to be filled in and on the backside I believe there is part of the casting that is raised for the backside of the studs to fit through. I'm struggling to see a good way to correctly fill these in/change up the backside to accept a 4 lug pattern. I'm open to suggestion obviously on this, but again am finding a hard to see how modifying would work for this. Again I would redrill the rotors to be 4x114.3 for the fronts as well.


Also I'm open to other suggestions as well, now I know some people may say to just swap over a setup from a 4 lug, but I want don't want to downgrade braking performance for this change. I also don't want to run adapters since I don't really trust them in all honesty. Seen a few break(some with the cars at full tilt) and probably couldn't get that thought out of my head while driving it.

WondrousBread

I briefly had a similar setup on my car.

For the fronts, keep all your 5 lug parts and then swap only the hub for a factory 4 lug. Then have the 5 lug rotors redrilled (cost me $30 at a local machine-shop) and you need a 3mm spacer between the hub and the rotor. I made a spacer myself out of a wheel spacer I cut down, or the machine shop will be able to make you one. There are instructions for this on Aaron's website at Aaroncake.net. He says 4mm, I found 3mm was closer.

For the rears I kept the solid rotors, and ended up finding a full set of 5 lug parts before I actually ran the car. So I didn't actually need to, but I don't see why you wouldn't be able to do the exact same thing as the front, although the rotor face thickness between the solid rears and vented rears will need to be measured to see if you need a spacer.