Fender Flaring 101.

the welder guy is done with flaring the fenders and wheel arches. only thing left to do is to grind of some excess sheet metal here and there. right now the 5.5" stock rims look really small tucked under such wide arches. i should be able to fit up to 8" wide rims now looking at it.


front arches.


new rust area that will be fixed, after removal of the petrol tank. it's the rear bumper hanger slot.


so basically the whole point of having wider fenders is to get wider wheels under them and by doing so, you change your suspension geometry by widening the track width of your car. handling would be better since the wheels now sit further out from the chassis. handling is still heavily reliant on your suspension setup, but in general, the wider your track width, the better the handling.

going too wide however might stress the axles unless customized parts have been made (according to your new vehicle specs) since the wheels now sit further out now. but this is really a case when you go really really far out of the body and by the time you reach that, you'd notice some drive shafts have bent or are really out of position because the weight of the car is not supported by whatever is linking your wheels to the axle. not to mention your dampers would have to be totally reworked to accommodate this setup.

enough of that technical mumbo-jumbo. one problem that i've come across is the odd PCD (pitch-circle-diameter) that the cortina has. it has a 4x108 PCD (4 represents number of bolts and 108 is the PCD) which is very rare to obtain here in malaysia which is dominated by japanese makes which have PCDs of 114.3 normally. so, hunting around in chop-shops for old school rims is gonna be difficult.

last resort would be to order something from the UK. though the rims i've seen there aren't really to my liking as i'm looking for something like this:


or this but not pink on the inside. maybe fluorescent orange.


those 2 photos of the wheels are courtesy of Hayashi Racing's website.

there are other rims out there...but it all depends on the PCD. maybe eBay might have something i'm looking for but i'm afraid of the customs officers. they apparently over-charge you for bringing in stuff like these.

oh well, if any one has the above rims in 14x7 or 14x8 PCD 108. please drop me a message ok?