VCCA Home Forums Thread Like Summary - Tires for 47 Chev Stylemaster Business Coupe

I am getting my grandfathers 47 Stylemaster business coupe out of a 45 year storage and the first thing I need to do is get new tires so it can be moved. It has 600-16 on it now. The price of this tire (both radial and bias) is very high. Is there a more modern size tire that would be much cheaper that would fit on the wheels? Also would new tires require the use of tubes, which I assume may have been used? Thanks for the help, and as I proceed with getting the car running I am sure I will be asking many more questions of the members of this forum.

Are you looking for the tires that will become your driving tires once you have this on the road or just ones to roll it around until it is ready to drive? How long do you plan to be working on this project before it hits the road? I used the set of old dry rotted tires it had when it was pulled from a barn and had decent tubes in them until it was nearly ready to drive (use the proper tubes when it goes on the road with good tires). This way I did not have to worry about overspray on the rims, tires etc. when painting the car. If you have junk tires just get any tube from a farm store that fits in the tire for the use during your restoration.

Cooker has some good options on their web site.

Also to help things I bought a set of dollies to put under the tires to move it in the garage. It is surprising how helpful it is to be able to push a care a few feet sideways when more room is required where you are working. We used the ones that come in sets of two from Harbor Freight. Other advantage is that they give enough extra clearance to crawl under the car for many repairs.

That sounds like a great plan. The old tires should be able to support the car while you get things operating properly and safely.

I encourage you to wait until you are very confident that it will only be a very short time until you are driving the car. I made the mistake of buying tires and tubes way too early in the timeline to get my car going again. So when I started driving the car I already had “old” tires and tubes.

So for the next vehicle project we actually waited until tires were the reason we could not drive the car except slowly up and down the street.