So I did do some 'net searching, looked thru here too. Alphabet soup! Some sites are clunky and time consuming at best, then you have to find a tire and hope they list full tech specs for size, rim width, etc. Well I'm gonna be shameless and ask my HAMB brethren. What are good sizes in modern or metric listings to replace 7.00 16 and either 5.50 or 6.00 16? I don't want to drop $400/tire, I just want a plain ol black tire, radials, and again I know Coker, Diamond Back, etc, etc has stuff. No thank you, even getting a commercial discount I'm over $400/tire plus the ride plus mount and balance. So back to the shameless part, best size conversions. Back wheels are 5 1/2 wide commercial wide 5s, fronts are 3 1/2 wide 5s. Current rollers are 7.00 16 and 6.00 16, rears are about 31" tall (or close), fronts are 27. Also this topic may help others. If we can lets keep brands and radial vs bias out of it. It's an old black car and generic tires are just fine as my goal is as many smiles per gallon possible vs power parking and style points. As always, thanks in advance.
I don't have a direct answer for your question, but here is a valuable resource that I use for figuring out radial sizes. https://tiresize.com/calculator/ Especially the 'tire comparison' tab where you can put two different tires side by side and see the difference. So, if you have the rough dimensions of a 7.00 16, you can play around with the numbers and find something that is similar in diameter and width, and then see if that tire is actually made.
There a few I found handy ; https://robrobinette.com/tire_diameter.htm and the one already listed by Dan Hay Metric Tire Conversion
Hello, $400 per tire = $1600 for all 4 to save your lives and to make your hot rod safe for every day driving seems very inexpensive. There are some people that spend that much for a ride along mower and it never sees daily driving on the streets. It is your hot rod, your likes and dislikes, but comparing something as safety and handling on your daily driver, the cost should not be a problem. Plus, you probably have saved that much by not going on a vacation with the family over 2020 due to the pandemic and therefore saved that much for necessities. (Like a good set of tires for your hot rod.) Now, despite the reduction of color levels of the pandemic guidelines, there is still much that is unknown and is likely to be with us for a long time. What started out as the flu is still around with variants over our lifetime. But, the feeling of driving around on a good set of tires makes it worthwhile, the cost overridden in this case. So, pandemic is kind of a family income saver. What you did not spend on a vacation is now available for that tire set purchase. Jnaki All of our hot rods and drag racing sedans always had the same size tires. So if a flat was upon us, the spare took us back home in level comfort. Even in our sedan delivery with the 327. The tires were expensive, but they were all the same and made handling the sedan delivery outstanding. But, it was the safety factor of excellent tires for the hot rod that gave me a sense of security when my wife took it out for a visit with friends or shopping. No amount of people telling me different size tires makes it more aggressive looking. I knew that when I stepped on the gas, on equal size tires, no less. Our modern day station wagons have equal size tires and wheels, as they should. But for a couple of years on a different model, we had huge tires on the back and normal size on the front. The spare was the same as the front tires. But for 40000 miles, we never had a flat, but worried that a situation was going to be there with the different size tires. It is and was many hectic moments when driving around in big and little tire sizes was a reality. The cost was negligible as it was safety for the family and extended family. No amount is worth skimping when it comes down to tires for your car/hot rod/station wagon and family. YRMV
I know exactly where you're coming from on this, I've been doing this for years. The giant fly in the ointment is aspect ratio; those early tires used aspect ratios of 85 or even 90 (tall and skinny), there's very damn few tires being made like that these days. Now, I did find a modern analog for your front tire, but you won't like the answer. A 155/90R16 is an almost perfect size replacement, but it's a 'space saver' spare tire and comes with all the limitations these have... max speed and distance limits. NOT a practical choice. The rear tires come up as truck/SUV, more choices but most will be aggressive off-road types and wider. So what it comes down to is you have to pick one of your current tire dimensions and compromise on the others. Generally if you're trying to match diameter, you'll have to eat more tire width and may have issues with wheel width, although I've 'cheated' that in the past with no issues, just don't get carried away. I just dealt with the same issue. My '60 Galaxie came originally with a 7.50-14, there is virtually no modern off-the-rack analog for that size. A 215/75R14 gets close but is still small on the car, I switched to 15" wheels to open up choices, otherwise I would be stuck with expensive bias-ply reproductions. In a way you're lucky, as 16" sizes are more available now than they were in the '60s/70s but there's very few if any that will match up dimensionally with the old sizes.
My brother got some 6.50-16 Tornel tires (coker, through Summit) for the hearse a few years ago, pretty reasonble, worked tubless on the original 1940 LaSalle wheels, I thought they were nice tires. Made in Mexico. But they don't have other sizes, and they're also on back order now, no telling when they'd arrive, if ever. No big-n-little option. We would have got radials for it if there were something that was tall/skinny enough, but there wasn't. 13-15" sizes are not hard to find a cheap radial replacement, but 16s, not so much.
You could run 215/85r16 & 235/85r16, I see listings for those sizes available. Found in another older thread. Sent from my iPhone using The H.A.M.B. mobile app
I found one 215/58R16 that's a passenger car tire, the 235s are all heavy duty truck/trailer tires. and the 215 costs the same as that 6.50 bias tire that I mentioned before...$140ish
It's a light wt car, just under 3,000lbs fully loaded based on title wt and OG specs. Might have a top speed of 75 MPH max for my uses but will likely see 60 or under most days of it's life. I am fully aware of quality, looks, authenticity and more, I'm in the restoration business. If I was putting tires on the 47 Cadillac I wouldn't hesitate. It's bigger, needs more load capacity, requires a look that comes at a price. Not to mention it has likely 3 times the value and deserves more aesthetic investment than my knock around original paint hot rod. Tires for my late model Caddy are $380 each and will handle 170 MPH. I see no reason to bend over for a tire that "fits" a look more appropriate to some high dollar collector piece or 6 figure hot rod. Smiles per gallon, and I don't really care to pay twice the price to hit a simple look that in the end will mean NOTHING to the end result other than it has current tires up to the task at hand. I appreciate your input and already think things thru beyond most and I came to the "What the hell are you doing?" question as I shopped all my usual sources for tires. Nothing wrong with making sound financial judgment calls, and in this case added expense will add nothing in the way of safety, investent, performance goals, and yes, even aesthetics. Plain black radial tires. Again thanks for the thoughts.
I think the front rim width is going to be my major hurdle at just 3 1/2". I may have to go to the 4s but I like that old "front runner" vibe if I can get it. And I might just suck up a little more and give it new belteds, but radials are better suited for long drives and more. getting there is the juice, right? Thanks so far, but who's got a pic of newer plain ol tire on a "fat" Ford sedan or Coupe? This is for my 39 std Tudor.
I'd say that this is the case where you are looking for "driver" tires rather than "show" tires that get you in the inner circle at specific events. Bad part is that the direct change over for the 7:00 16 is a 235-80-16 that only comes in seriously heavy duty trailer tires. One tire is rated for more weight than the whole car weighs.
It might help some to go through the math a bit. It might be educational to figure out what the exact theoretical equivalent metric size would be, no matter how weird and nonexistent: Front: 27"Ø x 6" wide 27 - 16 = 11 11 / 2 = 5½ 5½ / 6 = 91.67% 6 x 25.4 = 152.4Theoretical equivalent: 152/92R16 Rear: 31"Ø x 7" wide 31 - 16 = 15 15 / 2 = 7½ 7½ / 7 = 107.14% 7 x 25.4 = 177.8Theoretical equivalent: 178/107R16 The rears especially are really weird. I've never seen an aspect ratio advertised at greater than 100%. I suspect that the old width figures are highly nominal, and that the section widths measured in the same way as metric tyres would turn out quite a bit bigger. In fact I think they are closer to tread widths, which are typically about 25% narrower than section widths. So, adding 30% to the widths I get 198/71R16 and 231/82R16, respectively. Those are a lot more realistic. The most user-friendly database I've found, for our kinds of purposes, is tiresize.com. It is the only facility I've yet found which charts tyre sizes by diameter. I agree with @Crazy Steve that the way to do this is to try to match one dimension, and then get close with the others. Personally I'd be inclined to get the overall diameter right, because that determines the sidewall heights, and a lot of the visual proportionality of the car rides, literally, on that. One thing I've found with that site is that the tab which says 27" lists tyres from 27.0"Ø to 27.9"Ø, so it's a good idea to look under the 26" tab too. Good candidates from there for the fronts are a 195/75R16, a 205/70R16, and a 215/65R16; and for the rear a 225/85R60 and a 235/80R16. Each size listed is a link which takes you to the actual tyres made in that size. I get a mix of light-truck and passenger tyres for the front, but only trailer tyres for the rear. That means that you might have to go wider on the rears. In all cases the acceptable rim width range is wider than the present wheels, so perhaps I was a bit optimistic in my width-figure correction factor. And you'll wonder if new wheels would defeat the object of affordable tyres, as the wide-5 will narrow your choice.
I don't know that I'd fully agree with that, I think there was more variation than you might think. I bought a '56 Ford wagon years ago that still had the OEM spare, a 6.70-15 Firestone 'Super Balloon'. Now this tire was very similar to todays tires in terms of section width vs tread width. But this size did fill the wheelwell up, installing a set of snow chains for example I'd say this was the max size you could go. Ford offered a 7.10-15 as an optional oversize, I wondered how that fit. Fast forward some years.... I picked up a one-owner '56 Ford Club Sedan, and this had a rather threadbare 'period correct' 7.10-15 spare in it, I don't recall the brand. I was surprised by how narrow this tire was; while about 1" taller than the 6.70, if anything it was even narrower in section width than the 'Super Balloon' 6.70. I liked the look of the optional tire and how it filled the wheelwells so I went looking for a modern replacement. I ended up with a 235/75R-15 which matched the diameter but was considerably wider, so much so that they lightly rubbed on either side of the rear wheelwells under some conditions. Forget about chains, no room. Another interesting thing to note. The 7.10 dropped right into the spare tire well, lots of room. The 6.70 fit, just. The 235/75 needed to be deflated to fasten it in, then reinflated. My feeling on tire diameter is unless you're going for a big n' little or lowrider look, the OEM diameter (at least) looks best.
7.50-16 would be a 235/85r16 (31.73" dia.) 7.00-16 would be a 205/90r16 (30.54" dia.) 6.00-16 would be a 175/95r16 (29.09" dia.) 5.50-16 would be a tractor tire and probably best left on the tractor................ Closest size for 5.50-16 would be a 165/85r16 (27.04" dia.)....if there is such a thing.
I've driven over 100 k miles on two sets of Michelin 215 85R 16's, the first set I bought were 'gently used'. Wear well, good riding comfort, I drive 65-70 on long trips.
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