I Took my 19 inch racing hart c2 3piece off my rx7 and tried them on my 1997 e420 sport. The lug pattern on the wheels and as you know alot of japanese cars is 5x114.3. My benz as you know is 5 x 112. We are talking 2.3 mm. After a little trouble I squezed them on there. THIS IS THE TRICKY PART. I had my factory 17" amg monoblocks on there with the factory lug bolts and used them fine with the front wheels (19x8.5 with 37 offset) HOWEVER the rears are 19x10 with 42 offset meaning they stick in more to the car. After installing the back wheels with the factory lug bolts I noticed the wheel would not move but maybe 15 degrees and lock up. it would not spin in neutral when I had it jacked up, Good thing I never drove it!! IT was NOT hitting the caliper or anything so I was wondering why it was doing this, Turns out the lug bolts were TOO LONG and into the hub too much that according to mercedes they were hitting the emergency brake system. So after going to every mercedes dealer in the area and not being able to find any shorter (not short short, which I did find some of those) lug bolts, I went to a junk yard and pulled the perfect size off a '83 benz. Here's how they look. Any problems I should run into after putting these wheels on my car????!
This something I would try to do! Anyways, there is an issue with bolting on wheels with different lug bolt spacings.
First, as you indicated, you had to massage or stretch the lug bolts to fit. Each lug bolt now is partially contacting each lug surface. Probably only touching 20 - 30% of the overall surface area. Meaning, the surface area for the total of 5 lug bolts is only equaling to 1 to 3 actually lugs.
Second, the center bore for the RX-7 wheels is 67.1mm and for the W210, 66.5mm. The wheels that you put on are no longer hub-centric. In a hub-centric fitment, the way the wheel seats to the hub (perfectly), allows the rolling assembly of the hub/wheel to be centered to each other. To compound everything now, the wheel is centered by the lug bolts and they are not contacting the wheel surface evenly.
What could happen???
* Lug bolt mounting holes could be stress and the center of the wheel could crack.
* Vibration due to non-centered wheels
* Stress to the threaded holes in the wheel hubs, possible cracking, but unlikely... More likely the lug bolts will fail because of uneven loading.
* Also, from memory, the RX-7 wheels should use 60 degress tapered seat lugs not ball seat lugs like MBZ. If this is the case, then the ball seat lugs in the taper seat holes are only touching in a very small area.
A better way to go would be to get your front/rear hubs/brake disks redrilled. This will get the lugs to fit properly. You can then possibly find a very thin hub centric ring for each wheel. This may not be needed if you get the proper lug bolt fitment.
Or you can get custom made wheel adapters, but this wheel increase the off positive offset even more causing outside fender interference.
After all this said, you may no experience any problems, but you just don't know. Hopefully you will not find out when the car is in motion.
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