285s on a stock height 900

[MikeNH]

So the same friend that has helped me with the past few mods to my truck- bedlining the rockers, debadging and the flag bracket (allright- he pretty much did everything and I watched ) seemed confident 285s could get under a stock height 900 and not rub despite what the current opinions are on the matter. His sister has a 2003 GMC with 285s which was borrowed for our little experiment. Wheels from her truck were swapped to mine and we drove the truck up onto a concrete loading ramp next to his shop to try and compress the suspension as much as possible. I took some lousy phone pics-

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see in the last pic, we're talking millimeters of clearance to the fender liner. No matter what we did compressing the suspension like this got it to make contact. Granted, these tires are pretty well worn so a new tire might require some modification of the fenderwell. My friend is an autobody guy and thinks the structure of the innet fender can be bent back some, pulling the liner with it and maintaining a stock appearance while opening up the fenderwells some. The truck looks so much better on 285s so when these tires need to be replaced I may consider it if I can find a set of 17" wheels I like, which has been extremely tough so far. I like old school wheels and most of those only go up to 16". Almost everything new is too damn busy looking. The current "choice" of mine are the current OE GMC 17s. On that note, if anyone has ideas about clean wheels in chrome or normal aluminum (sorry but this truck will never have black/dark wheels) 17s I'm open to suggestions. For reference, if they were available in 17s, the American Racing AR23 would already have been ordered. The only other one I found I liked were Centerline Wildcats but being a forged wheel, they're a bit spendy.

[nate1dawgg]

It seems that it's always a debate whether they will fit stock or not. This experiment shows that with some used 285's it'll be darn close to fitting. Thanks for your time and effort on this one