Hey guys, it’s Kevin and today am going to talk about fitting tires on a 2nd gen Ram 2500. So we bought a set of 35 inch tires to put on the old Overland rig here. The truck we've been working on is a 1994 Dodge Cummins 2500 with the 8800 GVW package on it which is basically heavier-duty running gear.
I just wanted to show you real quick, basically our service body here needed to be trimmed, so we went ahead and trimmed out through this area here. I don't know if you can see that in the video, but basically we took about an inch and a half off all the way around closer to two inches I think in order to get the tires in here without rubbing. We're gonna put some fender flares on there later once we find some, maybe bushwacker, some kind of flare that works with a flat body. Up front here had a little bit of rubbing going on even with the 33s that we had on there before and you can tell kind of right back here, this section had already rubbed down. So basically in order to fit the 35s it was real simple job, all I did was cut just on the inside, underneath the fender liner there's a pinch seam that runs down through here, underneath on the inboard side of the pinch seam. All I did was just cut the fender liner, hope you can see the recessed area right there in the video. So basically all I did was cut it and I tucked it back up and underneath. Real super simple I was surprised it was as easy as it was. There's your fender liner and I just kind of tucked it behind and just ran it backwards, I don't know, like two inches or three or something like that and just kind of tucked it back up underneath here. Really super simple mod and gave us the ability to fit these 35s. These are 315/75-16s and this is a stock height spring which is sagged over the last 20-something years of the truck being on the road with almost 300,000 miles on it. So its definitely seen it's day and probably lower than most four-wheel drives would be even with the 8800 GVW package. I just wanted to give you a little heads-up on that little clue there on how to deal with taller tires, we actually had some as you can see, some rocker panel damage on this side and then we had to kind of hammer out of the way down here a little bit, so most people probably would not have to do that. However in our case we did. It seems not to rub at all through its suspension stroke. We just did this two days ago and as a result its not rubbing. We haven't taken it offroad yet. We may end up having to extend both upper and lower control arms out in order to get it a little bit further forward, the whole axle assembly, for additional clearance. So anyway one more step in our endeavors to get this thing up and on the road. Basically its a service body we bought for it and got an old pop-up camper and this is designed to take us down through Central and South America. So anyway hope you gain something by this. Feel free to subscribe to our youtube channel if you want more updates on this big ugly Ram rig here.