How to match your TV wheels on the camper

Hi folks, thought I'd try posting some mods I've done in the hope I can pay forward some of the great advice I've gotten here.

I've got a 2015 183G that I swore I wouldn't mess with; that lasted about a week before I started cutting things off/bolting things on/swapping out parts, not because anything was busted but more because it's fun and I have an unquiet mind.

Anyway, the first thing was to match the wheels to my TV (2nd gen Tacoma).  I wanted to do this for a few reasons, including carrying a matching spare with the TV, having higher clearance (I tend to make poor life choices when presented with rutted dirt roads that might have a sweet campsite at the end of them), smoother rolling over bumps, and it looks pretty cool.

My Tacoma has 265/70/r17's which is about a 32" diameter tire (note: that's one size bigger than stock).  The rpod had 205/75/r14's, about a 26" diameter, so it would give a 3" lift (I believe the Hood River edition is on r15's, so your lift will vary).

A word about trailer wheels vs truck wheels:  they have different offsets (how much they push out from the hub) and different sidewall reinforcement.  I'll leave it up to you to make sure you've got the correct and safe specs on your tires.  In my case I had a set of matching 10ply/E rated/ 2600lb load truck wheels, so they're safe at the appropriate psi for that rpod (2900lb dry) with some safety margin to spare, especially important since I have a habit of bouncing my tires off pointy rocks at various speeds.

The challenges in this kind of mod are twofold:  first, the bolt pattern on the rpod hub is different than the Tacoma, and second the bigger wheel won't fit in the rpod fender.

Changing the bolt pattern:  turns out there's a whole industry out there of 'hub adaptors' that allow folks to put one set of wheels on a vehicle with a different hub.  Honestly, it seems super sketchy to me when done on driven axles (ie, on a truck), but I was willing to try it on a trailer that has way lower braking/acceleration forces than a wheel with an engine attached to it.  Specifically, I used a 5x4.5 to 6x5.5 hub adaptor.  It'll be different if you have a different TV hub bolt pattern of course.  And, there are various threadings of lug nuts, make sure you use the correct ones.  In my case, I think the lugs on the rpod were 1/2-20(?) and the TV wheel was M14-1.5, but I may be misremembering.

One of the side benefits of the adaptor is that mine was 2" thick, which was perfect for spacing the new wheel far enough from the trailer frame so it wouldn't rub (in other words, dealing with the change in offset from the original wheel to the new one).

If you use adaptors, make friends with a big bottle of red loctite.  For those of you fortunate enough to have spent time touring on big single cylinder motos like the KLR650, you will either already be familiar with this magic substance or you will have gigantic quads from hiking miles back up mountains to find the bolts, racks, wheels, and mirrors that rattled off your ride. 

The adaptor comes in two pieces, which means that there are two more sets of fasteners that need to be torqued appropriately.  So, when you're walking out of the Napa auto parts store with that red loctite in one hand, make sure your other hand is holding your new torque wrench (or borrow your neighbor's) -- there are times when you can tighten bolts by intuition, and this is not one of them.

The original wheel off, 5 on 4.5 hub bolt pattern exposed:

Torquing the first of two parts to the hub adaptor; I used a 2x2 wood piece to keep the hub from spinning:

This is the second piece bolted on, showing the new 6x5.5 bolt pattern:

Showing the 2" thickness that spaces the new wheel out from the frame:

New size wheel installed:

2" of clearance from the frame:

And the new fenders I fabbed up from 16ga aluminum sheet I had lying around.  Also put in new LED marker lights while I was at it: