Upgrading the Bullnose: Vision Soft 8 Wheels Install

Howdy folks, Ed here from Bullnose Garage. I’m getting new wheels and tires, and that makes me pretty happy. Um, here we are. As you can see, I’m back from the wheel and tire store. Got my brand new wheels and tires. These wheels are Vision Soft Eight wheels. I presume they’re called Soft Eight because they got eight holes around the center. They’re made by Vision, but actually, these particular wheels are branded by a whole bunch of different places. You can get them from, uh, Krager, Vision, Blackrock, Pacer, even Jegs has a version of these that’s under the Jegs brand. My guess is that some place manufactures them, and then other places rebrand them and sell them as their own. Whatever the case, Vision was the cheapest for me, so Vision is the brand that I got. I just love the look of these old-school black rims with the chrome center caps. These are actually trailer center caps, but they work pretty nice. And then, of course, I got my bullet lug nuts on there. The tires are Cooper Evolution HT tires, so those are highway tires. And I got highway tires because this truck is never going to see any kind of off-road work other than my driveway, and I want it to be a little bit more sporty than off-road looking. It’s a two-wheel drive, so it doesn’t need to have big knobby crazy tires on it, but I didn’t want something so sporty that it didn’t look like a truck anymore. So that’s why I chose a highway truck tire. The Coopers just happen to have fantastic reviews and were the right price. And another big thing about them that I like is that the, uh, Cooper Evolution lettering is white outlined when you have it facing out. And I’m actually going to take a white Sharpie oil-based pen, paint pen, and color that in so it pops a little bit more. I’m going to have a separate video on how I’m going to do that. Should be really interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing how that turns out. So, God, it’s a lot. Just love that old school look with the white wall or the white letter tires and the black rims and the beauty rings. I can’t wait to get my beauty rings on. So, uh, let’s go ahead and do that now.

I said before that I really like the look of a classic black steel wheel, especially on an old school project. So I got the Soft Eight because that’s exactly what it is, and it allows me to sort of customize the way that it looks. What I’ve got here is some of the stuff that I’m using to do that customization. We’ll start with the center cap. This is just a four and a quarter inch push-through center cap. It’s like five bucks from Amazon. There’s not much to it. Generally, these are actually used for trailer wheels, but they’ll work perfectly for what I’m trying to do here. And they have a removable center so that you can grease your hubs. And what I’m going to use this for is I’m going to go find a 50 millimeter Ford sticker that I can put right there to make it look a little bit nicer. You got several center cap options. You can do something, a push-through cap like one of these. You can get a branded push-through cap for different wheel manufacturers. You could also get the sort of OEM look, uh, Ford center caps, or you can go out and get a real fancy sort of old school spider center cap that has the lug nuts kind of coming off from the bullet center. All of those are expensive. These are like five dollars a piece, and they look really nice. But the nice thing is that if I decide later on that I don’t want these or I want to do something different, I can just take them off and put something else on. I chose these bullet lug nuts because I thought they’d look neat, and it’s actually cheaper to go online to get these from Amazon than it would be to have, say, Discount Tire, who is who I’m having put the tires and wheels on, uh, to buy their lug nut kit. It’s like 45 bucks. These on Amazon were like 25 bucks. So, and they’re kind of neat. Uh, for my particular truck, these are one half by 20. So always make sure you get the right size.

And finally, I am a sucker for chrome beauty rings. So that’s what I have here is a, actually, it’s a metal 16 inch chrome beauty ring. And because the Soft Eight is your basic steel wheel, this should just pop right on. Just, uh, blings things up a little bit for me. If I’ve got a black tire on a black rim, they kind of blend into each other. I like having that nice separation there that makes it very clear where the rim ends and the tire begins. Personal preference. I got these beauty rings or trim rings from Amazon, and they’re kind of generic. I’m not entirely sure they’re going to fit on this rim. Everything that I’ve read in the research that I’ve done says that beauty trim rings should fit right onto these old school steel wheels, even if they’re aftermarket. But I’ve never done it before, so it’s moment of truth. Wish me luck. It’s pretty tight, but… and there we go, trim ring installed. Now, like I just said, it’s pretty tight, but it does go on there, and I guess that’s good. It means it’s not going to come off while I’m driving down the road. Keep in mind that if you do this, you’re really going to scratch up this black paint because that’s all it is. It’s just black paint on these rims, and I’m not too worried about that because these beauty rings are going to cover that up, and I’m planning on always having beauty rings on here. And worst case, you can always repaint them if you have to.

Here’s the back rim. I thought I’d give you a little bit more close-up view of what I’m doing. These trim rings are just real simple. All there are some clips. Make sure you get your valve stem through the right spot right here, and just bang them on. Like I said, they’re tight. And there we go. So, of course, you can’t put on new wheels and tires without adding custom valve stem caps, which is what I have here. Let me see if you can see that or not. There we go. Yep. So probably nobody’s ever gonna see it, but they’re neat, and they were a gift, so I’m gonna put them on right now. Here we go. Nice. These tires are 245/75/16. Now, the stock tires that came on this truck were 15 inch tires, and these are, of course, 16 inch rims with 16 inch tires. I went with 16s because, of course, bigger rims are a little bit sportier, and I also knew that I was going to be having this big trim ring around the outside, which is going to sort of enhance the apparent size of the rim. So I went with 16s. I could have went with something a little bit wider or even a little bit taller to fill out the wheel well more, but again, it’s supposed to be more of a sporty truck. I don’t want to lift it. I don’t want to make it, you know, a big monster or anything. At some point, I may lower it a little bit, but probably not. I think I’m just going to keep it stock height. And so these tires, I think, fill these wheel wells appropriately. I think they’re the right size. They’re a little thinner than I could have gone, but again, that’s more for the sportier nature of the truck, and they’re a highway tire, so they don’t really need to be really wide or weird looking. Down here in the Southwest, you get a lot of vehicles that have really, really wide tires or tires that stick out really far from the wheel fenders, and I just like that look. So I wanted something more or less stock that was just a little bit sportier. That’s why I went with that size.

While I was going around changing all my wheels and tires, I figured I probably ought to do the spare too, so I went ahead and got a 15 inch spare tire. It’s about as cheap of a tire as I could find, but it’s still a full-size tire. So if something ever happens, I should just be able to pop that rim and tire wherever I need to pop it on and drive it for pretty much as long as I need to. So that was important because all of the tires on this truck, especially the spare, were very old. Now, the tires that were on the truck were at least 10 years old. I have no idea how old the spare was, but it’s probably a good time to talk about that fact that those tires were 10 years old, and I drove this truck for a couple of years with tires that old. And just recently found out that tires older than 10 years are really pretty dangerous. As a matter of fact, I went to the same place I got these wheels and tires and tried to have them patch one of my old tires, and they refused and said, ‘No, that’s too old. Company policy says we can’t patch a tire that old.’ And after giving them a little bit of a sob story, they went ahead and patched it for me just so I can get back on the road again. But that really sort of tripped me into getting these new wheels and tires because I think it was time. And, uh, of course, being a father of two now, I need to be responsible for my own health. So blowing out on the highway probably wasn’t a good idea. So if your tires are over 10 years old, change your tires because even if the tread is good, I learned this, even if the tread is good, the tire rubber itself starts to go bad, and it’ll dry out, it’ll crack, it won’t be as, uh, elastic anymore. You won’t be able to take those bumps, and, um, it won’t be as able to absorb things on the road. They’re easier to blow. Um, yeah, it’s just bad news all around. So make sure if your tires are older than 10 years that you take care of that.

One thing you want to make sure of when you’re buying an aftermarket rim is that you get the correct width and the correct offset and backspacing. Offset and backspacing are kind of the same thing. They’re different numbers, but they relate to each other, and that’s how far the rim sticks out side to side. And that’s going to affect you, especially in the front where you’re turning the tire, turning the rim, whether or not that’s going to impact inside your fender well, if it’s going to rub or bump anything up in here. As a matter of fact, if you get it too shallow, it could even interact with some of the steering components, uh, brake components up in the front of your vehicle. So you want to make sure that you get that not too shallow and not sticking too far out because you get it sticking too far to look funny. Another thing that you want to do is make sure that you get the correct width rim for the tire that you’re going to fit. So tire sizes like this one is 245/75/16. The 245/75 is a ratio of width to height, and the 16, of course, is the rim size. So the wider the tire, the bigger that first number is going to be. So 245 for a truck is not that wide. If I got something like 275, 285, 305, then I might actually start running into problems with this rubbing the fender wells, or especially in the front where you’re steering, it could, you know, hit the fenders or some of the, uh, this, the plastic stuff up in here. Actually, it’s metal back here. Well, who knew? So anyway, yeah, that’s something you want to, uh, definitely pay attention to. And if you’re getting extra wide tires, you want to make sure that you get a rim that has the correct width because if you don’t, then the tire, if it’s just too thin of a rim, the tire could actually bulge out, and then you’ve got uneven wear. And if it’s too thick of a rim, then the tire will actually come out and create like a little V-shape, uh, which is not good for the tread and tire wear and safety either. So for 245, this is an eight inch wide rim. It’s perfect. And just make sure when you’re getting your tires and wheels together that if you’re doing it on your own and you’re doing your own research and you’re finding your own stuff that you appropriately match the tire width to the rim width.

When I went looking online for how wheels and tires like this set here would look on my older truck, I found it really hard to find examples of how these particular wheels would look. All these wheel and tire stores online have these visualizers, you know, these fancy web programs that let you see what the wheels look like on your vehicle, but none of them go back to ’85. So the only option that I had was to go online and try to find someone who had not only put wheels and tires like this on their truck, but also had taken pictures of it and posted those pictures online for everyone to see in a way where I could search for it and find it and take a look. I just didn’t see much, so these wheels and tires were kind of a shot in the dark, and I’m really happy with how they turned out. And that’s one of the reasons that I made this video was so that anybody else who’s got an older truck like this ’85 F-150 could see what wheels and tires with this kind of a look would look like on that truck or a truck about that same year, and then also what kind of options you had in terms of your, uh, push-through center caps, lug nuts, beauty rings, that kind of stuff.

Now, I know a lot of guys would tell me that I shouldn’t have strayed away from the OEM look, that these old Ford hubcaps are classic and, uh, that they really just make the truck look nice, and that if you’re going to do a truck restoration or a registration of any kind, that you really should just stay with OE stuff and not add all this fancy bling-bling stuff. And to those guys, I say, well, you’re entitled to your opinion, but it’s my truck, and I’m going to do things the way that I want to do them. And I really, really like the way that these turned out. By the way, you may notice that these tires look a little bit different than they did earlier in the video, and that’s because I’ve gone ahead and colored in the letters to make them pop more, make it even more of a kind of white wall old school look that you just can’t get from tire stores anymore. So you have to paint that, and I’ve got a video coming up that’s going to show you exactly how I did this and, you know, talk about what materials I used and how long it took because it took forever. But I do like the way that it turned out. I think it looks really cool. I look super cool on the truck, but you’re gonna have to wait for that video to come out to see just how all four tires with the new white lettering looks on the truck going down the road. I’m super excited to shoot that and get that out.

Guys, if you found this video helpful to see what wheels and tires like this might look like on a truck like that, or if I entertained you in any way, shape, or form, go ahead and give me a thumbs up for the video. That really helps me out. And hey, you know, if you, uh, if you’re interested in seeing where I go with this truck, what kind of stuff I do to it in the future, all the big plans that I’ve got for it. I know I’ve got a brake overhaul coming up. I’m doing front and rear brakes completely overhauled. Um, I’m probably going to end up redoing the suspension, and obviously I’ll be doing the engine and all kinds of interior updates, maybe stereo, all kinds of stuff. If you’re interested in seeing any of that, keeping up with what I do, make sure you subscribe to the channel. I’ll be posting videos, uh, as much as I can to get this information out there. I really enjoy doing it, and I hope you guys enjoy watching it. So, as always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, guys. We’ll see you next time.