Protege5 Wheel and Tire Change

[timb24]

I got some good advice from reading this forum so I thought I'd post my wheel and tire change in case it helps somebody else. I've got a 2002 Protege5 with 110K miles on it. I had enough of the low profile one direction tires in that hard to find and expensive 195/50/16 size, with terrible wear, and awful in the snow, blah blah... So I wanted to drop down an inch in rim size and get a higher profile radial tire. I finally did it and am real happy with the result.

I went with Discount Tire Direct, and bought the MB Seven X wheel with black spokes in 15x6.55 size (15x6.55-100/11438GBM) and the Hankook Optimo H727 195/60/15 87T DSB tires. That calculated out to be .8" higher sidewall, and .5" larger overall diameter, which only puts the speedometer off by 1.4 mph. Discount Tire mounted, balanced, and shipped for $629. That included gorilla lug nuts and hub rings. That's alot better than spending $400 on just tires in the stock size, every 20K miles...

See attached image for the result

 

[brians_d-ride]

looks pretty nice, especially considering most people these days go for huge rims instead of smaller rims. nice to see someone modify the car for comfort rather than look. however, you could have tinkered with the tire size on your factory rims to help ride quality. i hated the 195/50s that were on the car. ride was harsh and they just looked really small to me. i went up to a 205/55 on the factory rims and couldn't be happier. improved the ride quality, filled the wheel well a little better from the side view and rear view, and it didn't affect my mileage a noticeable amount. and don't forget that slight air pressure changes can affect ride quality quite a bit too.

and if you were changing your tires out every 20k you were either buying cheap tires or you were way too hard on them. i've used everything from cheap walmart tires all the way up to the 800 a set type tires, i've never gotten less than 30k on a set of tires.