Posted by Clint Dixon on Thursday, September 19, 2002 at 11:23PM :
There seems to be a lot of interest lately in 20" wheels to fit the WC/Power-Wagon/M37 stud pattern. What I heard last weekend may have been talked about here before. If so, I missed it and sorry to take up space.
First to recap: I had 20" wheels on a 1948 B1PW. These came from a Ford AA truck and were installed on the Power-Wagon by my grandfather's cousin. He cut the rivits out that attached the centers to the rim and rewelded the centers inward to retain the stock Power-Wagon track width. This caused the wheels to be offset such that they could no longer be dualed. These wheels were somewhere around 6" wide and accepted 8.25X20 tires nicely. I had always been told that the only truck that used this particular wheel stud bolt pattern, other than the Power-Wagon (and Dodge military), was the Ford AA. I had also been told that the newer the Ford, the wider the wheel, and that the wheels with this bolt pattern were used up into the late '40s. The man that I purchased the truck from was a Ford collector who had an early '30s Ford AA in his collection. It's wheels had the exact same centers rivited to narrower wheels. They would bolt up perfectly to the Power-Wagon.
Last weekend I talked to another Ford Man. He indicated that he had always understood that that particular Ford AA wheel had to be a Budd wheel to have that pattern. That the pattern was a "Budd" pattern and not a Ford pattern. And, not all Ford AA trucks used the Budd Wheel. He said that it was basically up to the customer who ordered the truck to specify if they wanted their truck to have the Budd wheels. If they wanted them, they got the Budd bolt pattern. If they didn't specify Budd wheels, they got a standard Ford pattern, which had a bolt hole circle of a slightly different size. He believed that the same Budd wheels and bolt pattern may have been available as an option through other truck builders as well.
This may explain why some swear by this particular pattern as being used on some bigger Dodge and Chevy trucks as well. Any weight to this theory?
Clint
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