Wheel hub spacers be warned!

[tmontague]

I purchased these spacers (1 pair) from seller BestForAuto off of ebay. They are 1.5cm and made my fitment upfront perfect. I currently am running +38 offset rims 15x6.5 with 185 rubber. With -2.5 degrees offset it fit perfectly with only minimal rubbing on bad dips on the highway and it was only touching the plastic inner fender never the metal. With this fitment I wouldn't be able to run a wider tire, but it fit fine with the 185.

Anyways, I used my torque wrench and torqued everything to the proper 76 ft/lbs. The car drove fine for a week travelling about 100km round trip every day including the horrendous Burlington St. in Hamilton which is probably the roughest road I've ever traveled on.

Since I've moved a couple weeks ago I've noticed that my front tires were wearing down fast and were feathered due to the increase in driving distance every day.

I never aligned my car after I lowered it last year and was monitoring tire wear and highway wander, everything seemed fine so I figured I'd wait until this summer since I had it aligned last summer.

I took my car into Active Green and Ross on the mountain to get it aligned. I hate to take my car to any shop or have anyone else touch it (still haven't done the two pending recalls) but I don't want to fork out thousands of $ I don't have for an alignment rack. So $100 every year or so isn't too bad to have it done.

I forgot to ask them to leave the camber alone (I had it set to max -2.5 to avoid rubbing with the spacer). They adjusted my toe which was about -1 degrees both sides and corrected it to -0.05 degrees. The rear was toe in 0.25 and 0.35 which is good enough.

After picking up the car I realized that they had corrected the camber to about -1.7 which i realized I'd had to fix since I didn't want to have any extra rub. When driving home from the shop and the next day (~45km) I would hear a wump wump wump type sound when cornering under speed. The steering wasn't vibrating travelling straight so I kept on driving and figured if anything was wrong I'd see it when I fixed the camber.

Took the drivers side wheel off (lug bolts all were tight and I used an impact gun to remove them). I noticed 2 cracks through the whole spacer, when I removed the lug nuts holding on the spacer the spacers crumbled into 3 pieces.

When I went to remove the passengers side wheel 2 of the lug nuts were so lose I could remove the with a socket in my hand.

I had to cut the lug bolts to install the spacers so now with the spacers removed I couldn't fit the rim back on. An hour later and thanks to an air chisel, I removed the oem cut lug bolts and installed the ones that came with the spacers. I left the camber where it was since I don't need the max negative camber I was running before.

Appearance wise it looks just as good since the camber is adjusted and I can now run a 205 tire. I feel a lot better and safer driving with no more wheel spacers and the car tracks way better then before the alignment.

I called the shop today and asked to speak with a manager, I have to call back tomorrow morning to speak with him then as he wasn't in the office.

I'm beyond frustrated as I had my 3.5 month pregnant wife in the car with me. I won't be a happy customer calling them tomorrow, negligence is a bs excuse.

What I believe happened is the shop over torqued my drivers side wheels causing the spacers to split, and they under torqued (correction-never torqued) my passenger side wheels.

Also the hub spacers are cheap fragile metal that have no business holding on a wheel. They were hub centric and I run rings, so the weight is all on the hub and not the lug bolts.

TL, DR:

shop improperly torqued my wheels after alignment, leading to crumbled hub spacer and potential car accident with my pregnant wife in car. Moral of the story, trust no shop unless you specifically know the mechanic working on the car and trust no hub spacer.

I will never be running hub spacers again on any car I have, I learned my lesson, thankfully my family and my car are not damaged.