Hobby Design Wheels and tires

I'm I the only one getting this as a problem with Hobby Design?

I recently bought a set of wheels, 1/24 18" Enkei RPF, and a set of tires, 1/24 Yokohama Advan A048, planning to use them together. Problem is, the tires are more like 19"-20" tires, way to big for the wheels I have. Took a look at HD site and saw that they list almost every wheels model size but they don't do it for their tires, we basically have no way to know if a set of tire will work with any given set of wheels...

How do you guys deal with that?

In my case, I'm pretty sure I won't buy from them until they resolve that problem...

Well, I had the exact contrary feeling about their tires...
I explain.

I replace some wheels by aftermarket 20" rims. But problem is that no tires fit them !!
Most of the stock tires (Revell, fujimi, tamiya...) are more 18" or at maximum 19" and most of the time are too narrow compared to HD wheels width...
I thought buying tires from HD, thinking it may be logical to release tires matching their big size wheels... But was afraid their would be too small too !!

your experience seems to mean that all their tires are what I expected myself, contrary to you, 19 or 20"
But you may be able to find matching tires in quite a lot of kits for a 18" size.

Myself I'm more confident in buying HD tires for my 20" wheels ! :)

the problem i had with some HD tires that i bought is that they are not "sided" and i've got 4 directional tires that point one direction, basically 4 rights and no lefts.

I have no experience with HD tires. But I was able to successfully fit Tamiya tires from FXX kit to
HD 19" wheels and Tamiya tires from F40 Evo. onto HD 18" wheels. I plan to order spares from Tamiya
to use with HD wheels for my conversion projects. I've only tried Tamiya slicks, as I basically care only
about racing cars.

I've also ordered hd 18inch wheels and tyres, and experienced the tyres being too big for the rim. The tyres are horrible quality actually, very messy casting... still yet to attempt to use them.

the Hobby Design tires i have are the Advan A048's and like Euro z mentioned above they are "rough" on one side. i'm guessing here that they are cast in one piece molds with the one sidewall as the top, so what you get is a sidewall that's all chunky and sloppy. where that becomes a bigger problem is where like i mentioned in my first post, the tires are sided and supposed to represent 2 lefts and 2 rights. the way they are molded is all in one direction so you get two tires with good smooth sidewalls and two with some wonky looking sidewalls. i have not tried to fix them yet though and they may very well clean up, but then they might not too. currently i have those tires on some of the Nismo upgrade wheels from Tamiya and they fit nicely but are a little short in profile.

Guys, there is a reason why HD sells wheels and tires separately. I suspect they know full well that it doesn't match - but don't care?!

I'd rather buy my wheels from aftermarket companies that have proven to deliver matching parts for the last so many years. Actually, concerning wheels my best experience is with ScaleProduction. Best casting quality, aluminium wheels that don't really need to be polished, and perfect tires (in some cases even original Tamiya rubber!).

If I compare prices, yeah - the HD wheels look cheap at first glance. But if you have to rob another kit for tires or buy them separate, it often adds up being more expensive than buying a complete set in the first place.

Just my :2cents:

I sent an Email to HD yesterday, here it is:

Hi,

I just received a set of tire (HD 03-0074) and a set of wheel (HD 03-0127) thinking that they would fit well together, it's not the case.... Looking at your site, trying to find what happen, I just notice that you list wheel size on most of them but rarely you list the tire size. I would suggest that you do so we (modellers and customer) know what wheel fit with what tire. It cost me quite a bit of $$$ to get those and I won't be able to use them now.... Be sure that I won't buy other wheel and tire from Hobby Design until I can be sure of what fits what.

Hope you'll fix that issue,


To my surprise, I got an answer today:

Hello my friend:

Thanks for you give me the advice. I will fix the problem.Thank you.

So, there some hope guess....