Ask The Editors: Wheel Swap Limitations
How far can you push tire and wheel size?
So let’s take a quick refresher on how to read an ATV tire and wheel size based on the 3 digit system. It’s height, width and wheel size. So take 25×10-12 for example – this means the tire is 25 inches total height, 10 inches wide and on a 12 inch rim.
In your case going from 25×11-10 to 25×10-12 would be going an inch narrower in width and 2 inches bigger around on the wheels. As much as we’d like to tell you for certain whether or not such a swap would cause no issues, the only way to be sure would be trial and error in this case.
We would imagine it would be the difference in rim that would cause the biggest issues. If the bolt patterns of both rims line up, though, that would allow you to do some simple experimentation.
What we would do is jack the machine up from the center so that all four wheels are a couple inches off the ground. Perform your rear wheel swap, put the machine into gear and have someone give it just enough throttle to get the rear wheels turning while you watch from the back to see if the tire tread is making contact / rubbing anything when the wheels are in motion.
If the clearance concerns all check out, then you would be free to lower the quad down and take some low speed loops around the yard to see how the swap affected handling. Our guess is it would be okay but this is one of those situations where the only way to be sure is to try it and see.
