Fast forward to 2017 and my Duratracs are finally getting worn enough to replace. I had sold my work trailer and no longer needed to tow with my truck. It was around 214k miles, so from an
outside perspective, that sounds like it could be approaching an acceptable age to allow cutting of a little sheet metal. I finally had one of my five Duratracs die and I tossed on my spare, but another one would have left me stranded. Over the summer, a family member turned me on to a set of Rock Warrior wheels for a good price, so I had those sitting in the garage for an unknown tire. In a perfect world, I would have the space and funds to have 315 70R17 Nokian Studded tires mounted on RW wheels as my winter tires, and I'd run the 37" TrXus all summer and possibly for winter wheeling trips, throwing caution to the wind for the cost of the TrXus, weight, poor fuel mileage, noise, and hypothetically short lifespan of that stickier tire. But thats not reality for me, so I started trying to decide what to run next. If you are a gear head, and you have done a little autocross in your life and obsessed over every detail of sticky street tires, you know how hard it is to come to a conclusion on a new tire! But I knew I wanted to really figure out if I could make a 37" tire fit so a friend of mine and I installed it again in my garage and started crawling all over the front end with the front tires on wheel dollies and creating a game plan...
That game plan became removing 2" of sheet metal from the fender all the way around and including right behind the wheel. You should be able to see the hole that needed to be patched in the picture above. Now, this wasn't an exact science, obviously, because we couldn't turn the tire to check fitment until we actually had cut this out. But I knew I could cut more material and my friend could weld, so what could possibly go wrong?
Some things to note... By this time my truck is running 3/4" spacers on the front and I have moved the 3/8" wheel spacers to the back. I have the Nitro Gear UCA's installed. I have removed both front and rear sway bars a few years ago. I had already broken my antenna and plan on an eBay snorkel, so I removed all of the antenna motor from inside the fender (I have a new Tundra fixed one and am thinking of installing on the driver's side). As you can see, the plastic inner fender has to be removed and the grey outside molding needs to be removed, which I have cut the back edge off of to make it the correct length and will try re-attaching using only the 3m trim tape.
So after cutting out this material in the above photo, we disconnected the torsion bar and rested the control arms on the bump-stops and turned the tire to see how close we were. It was surprisingly close to clearing all around. I can't say this will be the same result for someone else, but with this tire and size of spacer it cleared the
frame at full lock! We then began looking at where it was going to next hit when compressed further and determined that the next spot would be just above where you see the large hole behind the tire. There is a metal seam there that extends into the fender well that we decided to cut next in a bit of a curve. Here is a picture of the driver's side...
This photo show the A-pillar drain tube inside and the upper seam that we decided to modify with a cut-off wheel and my grinder. Its very important, though, that you try to modify the upper portion in the least invasive way possible. Whatever requires the least amount of welding the better for the upper portion.
