A little advice on wheel spacers, lug nuts, and wheels

I come to you tired, and altogether $700ish dollars poorer since I chose to try to make something work which I was told would not. Basically I was tired of looking at the haggard factory wheels that came on my Lincoln Mark VIII. The chrome was peeling off of them and the tires were dry-rotting and were useless in really every condition. So I figured, why not try to get some factory wheels for the price of 1 aftermarket wheel and put some really nice tires on them. Seemed a pretty good idea at the time, I would have to spend about $200 more than keeping the factory wheels but I was okay with that because it would look better. So I drove to St. Louis to buy a set of 5 spoke Lincoln LS wheels for a smidge over $100. Waited a week for payday, and bought my $600 set of tires for my new wheels. After waiting for them to arrive at the store I drove to have them mounted and installed. Come to find the fronts won’t clear the upper control arm….like the internet said. So I had the rear wheels put on, and I drove home to find a pair of spacers so I could mount my fronts. I found 1 pair of bolt on spacers which had the hub clearance I needed and would get the wheel off the control arm. I didn’t have much money at the time (because I’d also just bought an MG) so I wanted about 4 months before I spent $150 and another $20 on non-locking wheel-nuts. And my front tires were mounted. Move on down the line about 6 months and I start to develop a shake in my steering wheel at random times. As this car was my daily I really couldn’t just stop driving it, so I drove it. That is until I sold the MG and bought my Tahoe. Then I parked the Lincoln until I had the time to take the Lincoln in and get the tires rotated assuming that some wheel weights may have come off and I was due. Get into the shop and they can’t rotate my tires. They tell me that the wheels on the car and the factory style lug nuts don’t match. The Mark uses a cone seat lug and the LS wheels use a shank&washer style lug. This is as I learned an extremely dangerous combo to run and I should have had my wheels fall off. They said they would swap them out if I got some proper lug nuts. So after some annoyed googling I found some lug nuts I thought would work. I spent $3.59 PER LUG, and bought 20 hoping my problems were sorted. Went back to the tire shop to find that I’d forgotten the threads on the spacers were different that the factory studs. So I could only have the new lugs put on the rear. They did that, and I drove home with my wheel still shaking and needing to return 10 lugs. After that I set my sights on finding an open end, shank&washer style lug nut that had the proper shank depth for the LS wheels but would also fit the threads of my spacers WHICH I LEARNED ARE FOR A LAND ROVER FREELANDER. And after 3 days of irritated searching, I discovered there are no lugs that fit this style. So I had one last option to try to make everything fit happily, try to re-stud the spacers to run studs like the factory. After one day of running to 6 different auto parts stores and being teased by the front end studs of a 2002 dodge neon, I gave up. My nice Lincoln LS wheels and really nice tires have to come off the car. Because now I’m spending $300 to buy the least expensive tires I can get, on the ugly factory wheels, just so I can sell this car and move on. And I drove it today with the factory wheels on with the still terrible original tires, no wheel shake. My steering felt weird and I occasionally hooned the Lincoln when the wheels were literally coming off the car. So basically kiddos, don’t buy wheels and tires before you are 105% certain they will bolt up without clearance issues, and you can get the proper lug nuts. Rant over, here are some pictures of the Lincoln as I get all nostalgic about when the car drove nice and I thought I’d keep it through 200K.

Once the Lincoln is gone, the hunt begins for a Fiesta ST.