Looks good, are these the same wheels that Tinkerers adventure Co-engineered?
Glad you like the wheels.
The short answer is no, these are not the same wheels as Tinkerer's Adventure's wheels. Please allow me to elaborate below.
I've communicated with Kai (Tinkerer) a few times over the last year, but such as it is he was already working on getting a "one-off" set of "true bead lock" wheels done for himself before we spoke with each other. I am familiar with the manufacturer that he used for his wheels, and we are not affiliated with that manufacturer in any way.
Tinkerer had his wheels made in a true bead lock form, which isn't something that we wanted to offer in our FN Wheels Rock Warrior wheels since true bead lock wheels are finicky, require extra maintenance / attention, and most importantly - true bead lock wheels wouldn't be DOT / street legal. Our FN Rock Warrior wheels have ribbed bead seats, which are an extremely effective alternative to off-road only bead locks. With ribbed bead seats you get substantially better bead retention compared to standard bead seats without the need to worry about precisely torqueing bolts to prevent your tires from going flat while driving on the street like you would with a true set of bead lock wheels. If your wheels are going to be dedicate for 100% off road use, then a set of true bead locks would be a great upgrade. If you plan to drive on the street with your wheels, aside from legality issues, a set of true bead lock wheels would likely cause unnecessary head aches. For what it's worth, we also designed and engineered a true bead lock, "off road only" version of our FN Rock Warrior wheels. We've just decided not to produce an off road only version because we didn't think we'd sell enough to justify a production run at this time
Also, I am not sure about every precise engineering detail behind Tinkerer's wheels (we didn't discuss minute details), but he is an extremely intelligent, thoughtful and thorough guy. What I do know from our conversations is that we came to similar conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the original TRD Rock Warrior wheels. We both agreed on the need for taller safety bead humps and most importantly the need for stronger flanges since the OEM Rock Warrior wheels have abysmally small flanges. I actually wished that the flanges were addressed in Tinkerer's earlier videos regarding fitting 37" tires on a Tundra, since a lot of guys watched his video, installed 37's on OEM Rock Warrior wheels, and then had issues cracking the wheels at the flanges. The OEM Rock Warrior wheels are too weak to handle 37" tires, particularly on heavy vehicles like the Tundra, Sequoia, Land Cruiser 200 or LX570. There have been a number of OEM Rock Warrior wheel owners who have bent or cracked their flanges with 35's, let alone 37's. Our Rock Warrior wheels were engineered and tested to handle the load and stress that larger tires exert onto the rim.
Another difference between our Rock Warrior wheel and Tinkerer's wheel is that our primary focus was to incorporate improvements to the original wheel while maintaining as much of the original design as possible.
I'm personally a huge fan of the appearance of the original Rock Warrior wheels, so I really didn't want to change any part of the design other than that which was absolutely necessary to increase strength or improve functionality. We tried to maintain the original draft angles for the spokes and spoke windows as much as possible. You can install OEM center caps in our wheels. Also, our rock rings are 100% compatible/interchangeable with the original TRD rock rings. The only difference is that our rings use a much more common M8x1.25 hex fastener as opposed to the original M8x1.0 Torx fastener (which is impossible to replace if you lose).
Tinkerer's wheel would be more of what I would call "inspired" by the Rock Warrior design. Aside from making his wheels as true, non-street legal bead lock wheels, which requires a totally different ring design, he also made some stylistic changes to the spokes and to the overall profile of the wheel. I believe he explains this as partly for cost cutting (reduced machine time) reasons and partly because he wanted to impart some of his style preferences into his wheels.
For example, here's a side by side picture that I took of our wheel with an OEM TRD Rock Warrior wheel:
I hope that he doesn't mind, but I took these screenshots from his YouTube video since there isn't a clear picture of his wheels on the internet at this time.
Tinkerer's wheel:
FN Wheels Rock Warrior forged wheel with TRD center cap:
Tinkerer's wheel with TRD center cap:
I think what Tinkerer did with his wheels is super cool, and his wheels would be great for someone who wants a dedicated off-road only set of true bead lock wheels that were inspired by the OEM Rock Warrior design. We just had something slightly different in mind with our wheels. If there's enough customer demand for off road only, true bead lock wheels then we can produce our design in a true bead lock from as well.
I'm sorry for temporarily hijacking your thread @n0rth ! I just wanted to make sure to get a thorough explanation out there before there was any speculation about the two wheels being the same.
