Itinerant Air-Cooled

I just replaced my tires with - Hankook Radial RA08 185 R14C. Oh my!

Any other thoughts? Or are these the best tires ever!!!!

I have enjoyed mine thoroughly, great tire for the price.

They are holding up very well.

tires-easy.com? Great price, very fast.

I got mine through Bus Depot.

In the few miles I've put on mine they seem to be a great tire. Smoother rolling and a little quieter than the Kirkland LT tires they replaced. I got the smokin deal through my dad who is a GM parts dept. manager for $263 mounted and balanced.

I hear that buddy. After I got my Michelins I'll never look back. It was a toss up between what you got and these Michelins. It was splitting hairs. So I tossed a coin.

The michelins definitely win the 'cool looking' points though.

Hippopotabus wrote: After I got my Michelins I'll never look back.

Man! With those seats and these tires, you have some sort of sleeper VW panzer.
Colin

you have some sort of sleeper VW panzer.

Hopefully after the Ball Joint work with fresh wheel bearings, it feel like a King Tiger.

Well I just had my Vredestein Comtrac 205/65/15s mounted on these GoWesty alloys and boy are they nice to drive with. Load index 102 running 30psi up front and 44 psi in the rear. Windwag greatly diminished. This thing handles really well.

Previously I had Michelin "The Ones" passenger car tires and they were indeed "weak in the knees" or sidewalls as the case may be (load index 95 30 psi up front & 35 (the max) in the rear).

I should have done this a long time ago.

I may have screwed up, but I hope not. When I bought my Westy this summer it came with passenger car tires, and "teeny" ones at that (P185/70R14). I was planning to buy new Hankooks or Coopers this fall after I got an engine in the bus, but then a Vanagon driver in our local club put these up for sale. He had put 2k-3k miles on them and then decided to switch to 15" alloys. The price was right, they came with the rims (which I wanted another set of anyway) and even though they are passenger car tires (P225/70R14) they are rated 1523#@44psi. To be painfully honest, I didn't notice that they aren't light truck tires till I got them home because I had LT235/75R15 Liberators on my truck a few years back and liked them, and I didn't even think to check whether they also came in a passenger car version. The seller said they rode great, alot better than the "car tires" that were on his Vanagon when he bought it. Hopefully I won't regret it, either way I'll try to remember to report back here.

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I would carefully check tire clearence. Vanagens have more room in the wheelwells. Good luck!

bus71 wrote:I would carefully check tire clearence. Vanagens have more room in the wheelwells. Good luck!

Thanks. Perhaps I'll go home tonight and throw them on, and see how they fit. By my calculations, they should be about 3/4" taller than 185R14s which will only extend 3/8" higher into the wheel well, but thay are about 1-9/16" wider which will extend half of that, or little more than 3/4" deeper into the wheel well.

"What's the clearance, Clarence?"

You should be fine. The '71 buses (the best VW bus ever made) have extra-wide wheel wells, unlike their predecessors.

And, for what it's worth, back in the dark ages (when I drove a '64 Sundial Camper and had shoulder-length hair) I always drove on recapped, passenger-car, radial tires. When VW buses roamed the earth and were still new, I only knew one person who used the LT tires (Continentals) and we all thought that he was weird.

Yes, ideally you want to be on stiffened sidewalled LT tires, but plenty of us old doofusses drove for years on inappropriate tires with no blow-outs.

OK, I confess, back in the day, as the kids say, we used to buy tires dirt cheap, recaps too. If you bought 4 with non matching tread, they were even cheaper. We drove all over the US, off road, creekbeds, etc. No blowouts. I guess I'm just chicken now!