Panasport wheels?

[vivancos9263]

Are those 15x8? Someone knows the ET? Made in Japan? Those were bought, I’m told, on the late 60s. Is that possible?
Thanks for your help!

[Chris Pomares]

They look like 8's. You measure from inside of the bead locks.

[Arne]

Late '60s seems unlikely. Give us a closeup of the area I've circled. I think that is a production date indicator.

[vivancos9263]

Here is the pic of the production date

[Arne]

Well. That isn't much help. Looks to indicate February (2 dots out of 12), but I also expected to see a year indicated there. Maybe in one of the other recesses?

[vivancos9263]

Pictures of the other recess....in the others there is just an “ok” and “made in Japan”

[Arne]

That doesn't tell us anything either. We may never know when they were made for certain. But based on 20+ years selling wheels and tires from the late '70s through the late '90s, those don't look like 'late '60s wheels to me. They look '80s to my eye.

In fact, I'm not sure that Panasport even existed in the '60s. I see that Vintage Wheel Catalogs has no Panasport older than 1980, and the cover wheel looks a lot like yours, even down to the Panasport sticker on the lip.

http://vintagewheelcatalogs.com/panasport/

[Oldboy_Speedwell]

Pardon the late bump, joined up here just to share a bit of info.

Firstly,
Arne is correct --- Panasport as a company only goes back as far as 1980.

Secondly,
the wheels can be precisely dated if the ink is still legible on the rectangular 'inspector' sticker,
although it is a bit tricky to decipher.

I am not well-versed in JDM but stumbled across the dating-key whilst researching all the diverse 8 spoke wheels, I will not directly link it here but if you're interested in reading just google "Minilite Wheels and All Other Likewise Variants Mega Thread" --- anyway, discovered that the early production of Panasports had those particular stickers by seeing a NOS set for sale on ebay:



Seeing that made me investigate and discovered an arcane secret of Japanese date coding: Emperor style.

"Although most people in Japan use, or at least are familiar with, the Western calendar (seireki), the traditional calendar is used for official documents. A conversion chart is provided below.

The traditional Japanese calendar is based on the reign period of the emperor. Each time a different emperor begins to rule, a new counting of the years begins and the period acquires a new name"

2019 - Present = Reiwa Era
1989 - 2019 = Heisei Era
1926 - 1989 = Showa Era
1912 - 1926 = Taisho Era

So,
the wheel I saw on ebay with 55.7.2 (year/month/day format) can be dated exactly to July 2nd 1980.

[72targa]

Very interesting research! Thanks!!