I have yet to see any state law verbiage that would outlaw beadlock wheels and not rock rings. I'm not saying that I know the laws in your county/state/etc, definitely not a lawyer here
, but everywhere that I wheel would have the same legal standing against a rock ring as it would a beadlock.
Furthermore, I have yet to see an NRS code (and a local wheeler around here is actually an officer, he concurs with this too) that actually makes beadlocks illegal in Nevada. I believe I have seen something specific in the Anchorage Municipality. However, I have not actually had dealings with an officer that even knew about this, but they are definitely there.
The way I see it, chances are if you are not driving around drawing lots of attention to yourself, an officer is probably going to ignore you like everyone else. The dick cop that does decide to pull you over, like the guy that got me a couple weekends ago, is going to harass you about stuff whether or not you were breaking a law. For instance, this guy was threatening to write me a ticket for not having side mirrors, which are not required by law in Washoe county as long as you have a rear view. If he had noticed and/or knew what a beadlock/modified wheel/rock ring was, I am sure he would have harassed me about that too, regardless of the law. Point is, that douche was bringing up every bit of my truck that was
out of the ordinary,
regardless of the legality. He got in to a bunch of stuff like body height, headlight height, ram assist, etc, none of which I even come close to violating, and most of which is not even discussed in the laws. He even tried to make a stink about the passenger door not having a window crank because my girlfriend wasn't able to roll the window down without getting the crank out of the glove box (the guy was so short that I offered to open the door so that he could see in the cab better, which totally set off his ego-issues about being 5'2" lol).
I wouldn't bother doing rockrings over beadlocks for legality reasons unless I lived somewhere that very specifically outlined that a
beadlock was illegal as opposed to any non-DOT-approved rim, because chances are that the jerk cops are going to make an issue about anything they can dream up. Just imagine when one of the jerk cops pulls you over for body height and mistakes your rock rings for beadlocks. Chances are he won't know the difference, and good luck trying to explain it to him without causing yourself more problems.
I'm not trying to say that you should say screw the law, or even that cops are in the wrong. I just want to point out that in my experience, the 1% of cops that are too lazy to deal with real crimes are going to hassle you for a rockring just as much as a beadlock. Those are the morons that you aren't going to be able to reason with either. When I run in to a cop like that, I just always apologize profusely and say that I hadn't even thought of it that way, it will get changed immediately. I don't even bother mentioning that I know they're full of **** because they're still going to write a ticket for a law that doesn't exist and I'm still going to have to take them to court over it.
Hell, look at how well psychological manipulation works for women.
