I have a '98.5 Dodge 3500 4x4 and a '89 Ford F350 4x4 ambulance in Georgia where I'm from originally. I'm planning to sell the ambulance, but I wanted to swap rims between the two trucks. The rear duals on the dodge have good tread, but they are more of a road only pattern and the fronts are down to around 20%. I put new tires on the back ambulance not too long ago because it had original tires on it (some had been replaced, but not all of them, it only has 7000 total miles on it). All the tires looked good, but one of them actually blew out just sitting still parked.


The new tires are the tires I want on the dodge, but I also like the Ford backspacing better (for those of you unaware, the dodge backspacing leaves duals awfully close together if you ran standard 235x85R16 truck tires, they can end up touching very easily). I'd been running a small spacer in the rear of the dodge to increase the gap, and the ford rims mean I can get rid of it completely.


I already know about the little indexing pin on the ford rims, and those are gone already. In fact, the rims are actually mounted on the trucks. Here's where my problem comes in though. The rims (other than having to remove the indexing pin) went on fine on the dodge, and when I put the doge rims and tires on the ambulance they went fine on the rear. When I went to put them on the front, I'm not getting them to slip over the little indexing ring that is on the dual wheel adapter (dually ambulance and that year ford is like the dodges in that they have a bolt on adapter for duals, at least on the 4x4s). For now, I put my spacers on the front of the ambulance so the rims are at least bolted to a flat surface, but I don't really like this setup, whether I'm selling the truck or not.

This also leads me to be concerned if I may have missed an expansion on the full floaters on the rear and those rims aren't really fully on the brake drum surface.

So the first part of my question is:

Will the dodge dually rims on the rear of the ford dually be fitting properly, and is the center hole on the rim big enough that if I taper it slightly it will fit over the indexing ring (or visa versa if I taper the ring a little, basically I'm curious if it's just a really tight fit and they will go over if I try hard enough). If not, is it safe with the spacers in there. I'm not going to sell a truck with safety questions.

On the dodge the rears also went on fine, on the front I did notice that conversely to the ambulance there does seem to be extra space. Doing an internet search said they use the ford rims with two tapered lugnuts to index the other holes, put the normal dually lugnuts on the other studs and then replace the two tapered lugnuts with the standard dually ones (dually lugnuts have a flat washer on the bottom and do not index the rim). This seems to me that it will again be putting weight on the studs although they will be tight up against the mounting surface as well (I'm not actually sure if the dodge fronts even index fully off the ring anyway or if it just keeps them close at this point, I didn't think they were all that snug on them when I pulled them off). I did do a search on this forum (as well as the internet as a whole) and the only answers I found were "sure, this swap should be fine!" or similar for EITHER direction, although there were some people mentioning center hole size the consensus seemed to be they were the same.


So question number 2: On the Dodge, if I index with tapered lugnuts, is there any concern regarding heavy hauling and long distance drives or any other reason not to use the Ford rims. This truck is in Georgia and is scheduled to go to Alaska next year pulling a 26' gooseneck.

It is more convenient for me to be able to use the ford rims and if there isn't a problem with load carrying, I like that bit of extra backspacing. I also have 3 extra ford dually rims as opposed to a single dodge one, which is another bonus since I would like to be able to replace a whole side of the rig's tires if I run over something in a remote area on the Al-can going through Canada. Invariably if you run over something you have a chance to take out tires on that entire side of the rig.

I apologize for the wall of text, there's a lot of information I wanted to get out there.