How bad did I screw up - 14" to 16" rims

[Faust]

I have a 2WD 1998 Ranger I bought off the government with very low miles and no rust. It is stock stock stock. It has these tiny wheels with krusty old Korean tires and it rides in a way that nothing conceived in Dearborn should.

Have any of you put 16" 235/70R16 on a 2WD stock Ranger

 

[BlackBII]

The wheels you got are 16X7?

If so, 235/70R16 tires will fit great on there. 235/70R16 should be about 29" in diameter, so they should fit fine. I would run a tape measure from the center of your current wheel/tire outwards to see how much bigger they will be.

275/70R16 is more like 31" in diameter and would probably be a bit too big for your truck.

 

[scotts90ranger]

yeah, that... they would fit fine but look at the door tag on the truck, find the axle code and look that up in the tech library (in the axle section somewhere there is a list of door tag codes) to find the ratio of the rear axle. A lot of the 2wd trucks that had 14" wheels seemed to get 3.08:1 gears from the factory to turn the small tires faster, if your truck has that then going that tall will be hard on the clutch (if manual) or hard on the trans starting from a stop, if it's 3.45 or 3.73 I don't think I would worry about that too much.

Another thing to consider is the speedometer, if you go to a taller tire the speedo/odo will be off, take the height/diameter of the new tire and divide it by the height/diameter of the stock tire and you will get a relatively close multiplier for the speedometer, IE take the number you got, multiply it by the speed the speedometer says and you will get the speed you are actually going. This can be corrected but I have yet to look into how to do that yet on the newer Rangers...