wheel spacers or washers?

I need to put 1/8th inch spacers behind my winter wheels to clear the brakes. Get proper spacers or just big washers? Grinding a bit off the caliper seems like a bad idea. Wheels won't be hub centric, guess I need to deal with that too...

You can buy spacers for less than $25 a pair. Anything from 3mm up.

With a 1/8" / 3mm spacer the wheel will still be hubcentric.

I would not trust washers unless my life depended on my getting somewhere slowly

In reply to Gearheadotaku: Washers are only good for test-fitting in the garage, to confirm the thickness of spacer needed. Spacers are the way to go, because they allow full contact of the wheel surface that normally contacts the hub. Without that full contact, the wheel will tend to loosen up in service.

you can get good-quality aluminum spacers for next to nothing on ebay these days. I run a full set of 8mm spacers on the e30 that I got on ebay for $30 brand new (for four of them).

Also "hubcentric" is important for locating the wheel when mounting it, but once the lugs are all seated and torqued correctly, they are what is holding the wheel in the correct location. The hub isn't actually holding the load unless your studs break for some reason.

Can you get away with just grinding the excess off the calipers where they hit, or is it too much excess? I've had to do this on several brake conversions where you take brakes from a larger car and bolt them onto a smaller sibling, but still want to run stock wheels. Lots of meat on a stock steel caliper's outer edges.

Honest question: I had to space a rotor out from the hub on one side of the front of my elky. I used same sized washers, one on each stud. These were about 1/8 thick.

Why was this as bad an idea as onthe other sside to space the wheel?