White walls on road wheels: Wide or Narrow

A 5/8" to 1" white wall 15" dia. radial is offered by various manufacturers at reasonable prices. The 14" tires are hard to find. No way i'm paying Coker or Diamondback prices for "C" body tires.
 
It is a matter of personal preference. I like the 3/4" stripe but I remember back in the early 80s my buddy had a 67 New Yorker 4 door hardtop with road wheels & Goodyear Arriva tires with a 1" stripe that looked great too.
 
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Whitewalls are like ties.... go wide!!!
 
Sorry, Lux, this comment in a C body context applies only to certain package cars, specifically 300 Hurst and SFGT and is inaccurate. By far, most road wheel equipped Mopars left the factory with white (or red) wall tires...even the Muscle cars...more so with C bodies. Just because many of the unwashed masses slap RWLs on cars now does not equate to how they came from the factory.

Don't believe me? Just sift through the factory literature...

As for whitewall width, it depends on the desire to adhere to factory accuracy or "the times". Formals for example in 78 got the wider white, because there was a return to wider whites in the late 70's 80's.

As always it depends on what you want.

The original post did not specify which C body the road wheels were on. I was not suggesting that all road wheels had RWL tires. As previous posts noted, at this point is is a matter of user choice or preference since the red, white or dual white stripe tires are no longer available.

Dave
 
Thanks for that clarification on the WWSW tires. At the time, the "J" size was something of a "Betweener" size, whether in bias-belted or radial. Later replaced by the "L" size. Was previously the 8.85x15 size.

Now we know, at a glance, in the sales lit and such, what tire size the car had by the sidewall width! Neat.

CBODY67
 
As for the "unapproved" use of RWL tires where they didn't originally reside, in some cases, that's the only way to get a particular size/diameter tire without going into the repro market. In those earlier times, RWLs were generally on muscle cars (and SFGTs) and, back then, tended to look out of place on a vehicle which should have had WWtires rather than BSWtires. Same with wheel covers rather than hub caps! It was about "being upscale" and "prosperous looking" back then, which meant whitewall tires with wheel covers or optional factory "trim ring/center cap" wheels. BSW tires and hub caps were usually on cheap fleet vehicles or police units (where spending the taxpayers' money on higher cost wheels covers might be frowned upon).

Some racers opted for hub caps for a small rotational weight decrease.

CBODY67
 
As for the "unapproved" use of RWL tires where they didn't originally reside, in some cases, that's the only way to get a particular size/diameter tire without going into the repro market. In those earlier times, RWLs were generally on muscle cars (and SFGTs) and, back then, tended to look out of place on a vehicle which should have had WWtires rather than BSWtires. Same with wheel covers rather than hub caps! It was about "being upscale" and "prosperous looking" back then, which meant whitewall tires with wheel covers or optional factory "trim ring/center cap" wheels. BSW tires and hub caps were usually on cheap fleet vehicles or police units (where spending the taxpayers' money on higher cost wheels covers might be frowned upon).

Some racers opted for hub caps for a small rotational weight decrease.

CBODY67


The police cruisers (EARLY 70's) used a different tire. They were a belted tire generally a H78-15 or the optional H70-15. They were a 6ply rated tire and were generally marked "for patrol use" or "Patrol Rated" or similar things to that effect. The 6ply tires were supposed to be a stouter casing that would hold up better in severe service applications. In practice the heavier casings held more heat and often came apart and threw chunks. The local Goodyear and BFG dealers were going crazy doing all of the warranty claims on those tires.

As a side bar, when I went to work for the Mopar dealer in 1972, I was the new guy, so I got the "grunt work", which was warranty related suspension and handling issues on police cruisers. We found a lot of tire related issues causing problems, belt "walking" so that the tires would not stay in balance and often the walking caused the tires to be out of round which made for a really rough and unstable ride at speed. We took to jacking up the cruisers and spinning all tires with the spin balance machine to check tire issues first before anything else. The tire dealers hated getting a call from us.

Dave
 
The Goodyear Blue Streak (fabric belt) radials were 6PR tires. As are the P245/70R-14 BFG Advantage T/As I got NOS for my '67 Newport (on 14x6.5 '65 SW wheels). LOTS of rolling resistance, for a radial, in those BFGs! And they are fabric-belt tires, too. I remember the "pursuit radials", too, especially the BFG Radial 990 radials from the later '60s.

The service manager at the local Chrysler dealer (who did work on the TX DPS cars) claimed that much of their suspension issues were from "jumping medians". They all had a lower front ride height, which he claimed was from that too. That could cause some of the tire issues y'all had too, I suspect. Gotta' catch those speeders! The car was "a tool" to do that.

They had issues on the first GY radials with "radial pull". Set them to specs, and the car pulled. Factory TSB said to re-set the caster to minimize pull, even if it meant the preffered specs were not met. They hated that, and especially the "slip and slide" alignment system on the '74 C-body cars. Personally, I thought it was pretty neat, but they liked "shims" or "cams" instead. BTAIM

CBODY67
 
The Goodyear Blue Streak (fabric belt) radials were 6PR tires. As are the P245/70R-14 BFG Advantage T/As I got NOS for my '67 Newport (on 14x6.5 '65 SW wheels). LOTS of rolling resistance, for a radial, in those BFGs! And they are fabric-belt tires, too. I remember the "pursuit radials", too, especially the BFG Radial 990 radials from the later '60s.

The service manager at the local Chrysler dealer (who did work on the TX DPS cars) claimed that much of their suspension issues were from "jumping medians". They all had a lower front ride height, which he claimed was from that too. That could cause some of the tire issues y'all had too, I suspect. Gotta' catch those speeders! The car was "a tool" to do that.

They had issues on the first GY radials with "radial pull". Set them to specs, and the car pulled. Factory TSB said to re-set the caster to minimize pull, even if it meant the preffered specs were not met. They hated that, and especially the "slip and slide" alignment system on the '74 C-body cars. Personally, I thought it was pretty neat, but they liked "shims" or "cams" instead. BTAIM

CBODY67

Police cruisers have always been a good testing bed to see what works as they are generally in high abuse service. I suspect that that jumping medians certainly caused a lot of the tire and alignment issues but the high rolling resistance and the excessive heat it caused was also a tire killer. A lot of the local police motor pools did lower the front ride height about 5/8" to improve stability a high speed. This tended to throw off the caster angle and was less than ideal for the steering geometry. But, gotta catch the bad guy. We re-set the ride height on a few of the cruisers and the pulling issues went away. Motor pool would lower them again and the same problems would return. Service manage finally told them that the cars had to be set to factory correct specs if they wanted our help with warranty issues as it related to the handling of the cars.

Dave
 
Originally, at least the 1970 and perhaps the 1971s came with dual stripe very narrow whitewalls...

Yep -- attached is the original spare in a 1970 Polara. Photo was taken in Summer 2016.

...that are no longer available from any source that I know of.

Unfortunately, I have reached the same conclusion.

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