I've been running beadlocks for over 10 years, and I've fitted quite a few sets.
I'm not aware of any that require the outer bead lip to be removed from the wheel. That strikes me as a terrible idea. Whose beadlocks require this?
I'm aware of two sources for steel beadlock kits- Trik Racing products make kits which are resold by quite a few places, including E4WD on Ebay. These are the kits I have installed. They are welded into the existing bead lip.
The outer ring is rolled in a shape to align the bead as you are doing them up. If you take care when you are torquing them up, they can run very true.
The inner ring is quite thin on these kits - 3mm. It deforms when the outer ring is torqued up and depending on the thickness of the tyres bead bundle, there's rarely much of a gap to see the bead through.
I initially thought this thin inner bead was a problem, so I had 6mm inner rings made up for my Gwagen. I don't believe this was a good idea - I think it has made aligning the tyre and sealing leaks harder.
The other source I'm aware of is Roctoy. These are made from flat plate and have a much deeper outer ring. They look cool but it will be harder to align the tyre when torquing the bolts up. They will also be much heavier than the Trik kit. Personally, I think the Roctoy kit is better suited to comp use on heavy cars.
Here's the trik racing kit on a few cars:
This is a very old kit installed with some tricks. I'm running 8X30mm hex head bolts "back to front" so the nut is on the outside. This makes tensioning the bolts faster and more accurate as you're not twisting the bolt through two misaligned holes to tighten it. These wheels also have doubling plates on the outer ring. These came from a mate of a mate and help to prevent the rings from deforming. They also look trick.
These are 15X7 rims with Q78 Swampers.
This is a trik 16" kit installed on 2WD F100 rims. Hardware is as supplied by E4WD - Plated unbrakos. Fitting these was quite hard as the F100 rims had a huge bead lip. Once I'd welded the rings in I wasn't able to get the tyre to seat properly as it was sitting on the bead lip and not the inner ring. I had to make a jig to cut the excess bead lip off.
This is the trik kit installed on 15X8 ROH Trak II rims, running 35 13.5 Krawlers.
And this is the Trik kit on offset 15X6 rims with Q78 Swampers.
I think you an see in some of these photos that the bead bundle isn't very noticeable. I don't like seeing it either.
Would you be welding them in yourself?
PS I know you've said you don't want alloys, but they are 47564847564X better when bought as a "made as a beadlock" wheel. I helped install as set of Krawlers on 15X8 KMC Enduros and the installed and torqued up so easily, run so true, and never leak - it's chalk and cheese over the slightly "hit and miss" steel beadlock. Breaking them down to chase leaks or re-align a tyre is a massive pain.
Here's the KMC's
I was so impressed with these that I picked up some second hand Walkers for my next car.
Steve.
