Tires to Fit a Typhoon

Update by Tim Suddard to the Tornado Typhoon project car
Jun 17, 2013

With the right tires, our Typhoon is starting to look like something. The stance is so fifties British with those skinny wheels.

The tires are from Coker. Tthey are Excelsior 17x4.5-inch, four-ply bias. They fit perfectly and look the part. They weren’t event that expensive: about $150 each.

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You can’t get street tires to fit a 1958 Tornado Typhoon just anywhere. In fact, we could only think of one place that might have ‘em: Coker Tire.

First, we called our expert on English Fords from the ‘50s. Yes, there’s at least one of these guys in the United States. That expert is Kip Lankenau of Kip Motors. We thought what we had were 16x3-inch English Ford wheels from an Anglia. What we really had was 17-inch wheels from a Ford Prefect. Kip told us the four door Prefects used 17-inch wheels and the comparatively more sporting two-door Anglia used 16-inch wheels.

Either way, Coker had us covered. For less than $150 each, Coker set us up with Excelsior blackwall tires. These tires look and fit perfectly on our spindly and skinny 17-inch Prefect wheels. These are tube type tires, so we had to get some tubes as well.

We won’t know for a while what these tires are like to drive on—our car is not running yet—but we can at least push it around and display it on the correct rubber thanks to the ever-diligent folks at Coker Tire.

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