I was looking at aluminum wheels for my son who races in the cadet class, the Douglas spun aluminum wheels are pretty much sold out everywhere. I did stumble upon these Aluminum Beadlock Wheels | PKT
Does anyone have any experiense with them and are they worth the extra 30-40 bucks?
Practical benefit is marginal at best. They solve a problem you may never actually see. They add additional problems like leaking bead lock screws. If you do end up getting them, get thread sealant, it’s cheap and works better than silicone.
Avoid bead locks if you can. To me, it’s 3 points of failure added to the wheel (air leaks), and they add a layer of work when mounting tires. In 10 years of karting running both hard and soft tires, I have not had a tire lose the bead.
When we ran cadet our OTK dealer set us up with short bead lock screws. They filled the hole in the rim but didn’t stick out the inside. It was perfect, you didn’t need to remove the screws to change tires. When we moved up I replaced the shorty screws with full length ones.
I use the long ones they usually come with the OTK wheels. The only downside for me is that I have to partieallly recessed them when I want to change tyres, but outside of that I don’t have many problems. In my club from what I have noticed they mostly use that one, and when they have to replace them they usually want the long ones because there’s the belief they will cause problems.
As far as I know they only cause problems if you run Shifter.