19.5" Tire Comparisons

wintersun wrote:
19.5 tires are overkill on a DRW truck. With my SRW truck I replace the factory tires rated at 3095 lbs with Nitto tires rated at 3750 lbs and so had support for up to 7500 lbs or 4000 lbs of payload with the truck. with the addition of Supersprings my Chevy 2500 was dead level with 4,000 lbs in the bed.

Only if I was going with a camper that had a dry weight of more than 4,000 lbs would I have to decide between DRW or going to 19.5 tires and rims. The 19.5 rims and tires would have cost me more than $3,000 and so not a decision to make for grins.

Lets just say we're heavy enough to either need 19.5s, or to move to wider LRE tires that would also require new wheels, and have several downsides of their own.

The wheels these come with are 17x6, with 235/80r17 tires. With 6" wheels you can't really go any wider, nor much taller since you're starting with an 80 sidewall. Aftermarket 17xWIDER wheels don't seem to exist, or the couple I've found have poor weight ratings (2500lb/wheel), so you have to go to 20s at that point. With 20s, you're looking at new wheels, expensive tires, fitment/footprint issues due to width (too wide to back between standard dually mounts on campers), and perhaps most annoyingly... that all the aftermarket 20" wheels I found are positional, so you can't rotate them to any position or carry a universal spare. Or, you could run adapters and shaved 22.5s, which aren't well suited to these kinds of loads and have a whole set of other issues. Not to mention that all those LRE tires will wear quicker and are comparably fragile. So, there are a lot of valid reasons to look at 19.5s if exceeding the weight capacity for a DRW on OE size tires.

The difference is night and day over the OE. F-450/F-550 and GM/Ram 4500/5500 trucks are DRW and come with 19.5s for good reason.