This is a test of a possible upcoming feature on www.imperialclub.com where people can have their own self-serve pages on the club website.
I recently picked up the car from the custom wheel/tire place and had promised pictures of it in front of our neighborhood aircraft carrier, the USS Hornet.
The car is sitting on 12″ wide 20″ diameter wheels in back, and 10″ wide x 20″ rims in front, with 315 tires in the rear and 275 width tires in front. The leaf springs have been deleted and the rear axle narrowed 10″ to allow the wider wheels to fit with maximum offset.
The car isn’t running yet, so it is on the trailer that I customized for carrying Imperials around. Note that the blue fenders are removable. The wheels have a deeper offset, moving them outwards, and this allows the fenders to be moved outwards to allow my W I D E B O D Y Imperials to fit. At one time I was buying and selling Imperials from Craigslist to Ebay and have been through about 40 of them.
The trailer has lights from a 1961 at the front for night operation, and a 10,000lb electric winch for pulling 5,000lb cars aboard.
There are also a set of zoomie headers from a speedboat that I found at a guy’s place on the scrap pile. I get people passing the truck on the freeway turned around taking pictures and laughing about the visual gag of having headers on my trailer.
The Car is now wearing 20″ wheels, which means that the steel 15″ roller rims are gone and I can now add the 12″ rear brake rotors and calipers that would not otherwise fit onto the rear axle. Front has 15″ rotors and I had to remove my 17″ rims due to clearance issues, so these are some BIG brakes.
The solid rims will not show brake dust on them, because there are no cooling slots in them – I chose the solid rims because they look like they’re moving when the car is standing still.
I have an alternate plan where I will wrap the black discs in sky blue chrome wrap. I asked the local wrap place to wrap them, but they had a firm NO answer. I asked why, and he said that the edges of the wrap would peel up quickly, and that it didn’t matter that people on youtube do it all the time, he wasn’t going to touch it as a professional.
Well, that’s too bad, because I already bought the wrap and if it’s a choice between wasting it and putting it on to see what happens, I’ll put it on and see. I will be cunning and plan to put a bead of clear silicone onto the edge where the black meets the aluminum. Perhaps that will forestall the edges coming up?
You can see a video of what the wrap will look like – go to 5:50 on the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1zXxHy_JeY
I think that I’m taking the whole black theme too far, and perhaps the blue will be unique and different enough to be entertaining and tasteful at the same time? The rims have some curve to the disc surface, so there will be some color flop present naturally in the blue chrome.
Let’s see if I can get the stuff to stick in the first place, and then we’ll see how the blue goes over. The black disc centers are powder coated, not paint, so should be more durable and able to stand up to this.