RALIVAN2: Our 2015 144" Sprinter

3 minute(s) of a 55 minute read

Will It Still Fit? - 

Or more accurately, will we be able to get it out of the building? What are we talking about you might ask. Well, we may have inadvertently made our new van a bit taller and it barely fit through the garage door aperture when we drove it into the building! All we did was install new wheels and new tires. The tires are the stock size: 245/75-16 and so it never occurred to us that they would alter anything but when we measured them we found they were a little over an inch taller than the old ones. This was mostly because the old ones were worn down more than we thought but that did not account for all of the difference, unless they had tons of tread depth when new. Regardless, the result is that the back of the van now sits about 15mm higher than it did when we drove it in and then we had 6mm of clearance. “Tight” is not the right word here. “Interference fit” might be more appropriate!

Anyway. More importantly, let’s talk about wheels and tires. If it’s going to be a RALIVAN it has to have proper wheels so we went with some BRAID Fullrace T Dakar in 16x7 and satin black finish. Just like Seb Loeb! Tires, for now, are General Grabber winters as, well, it’s winter. We may try running these year round or we may switch to some all-terrains if it ever warms up again. We did ceramic coat them before installing tires too.

While we were in there we replaced the brake calipers, discs and pads at all four corners and added some snazzy studs and lug nuts from Rennline.

Now to find out if we can get it out again!