Made myself a bearing holder. This is made from a spherical bearing weld ring and a grade 5 bolt with a 3/8" tab. It would be used on a front upper control arm to provide adjustability. It's slightly distorted now, I think I could press in the bearing but haven't tried it yet. Also haven't really measured how much it went out from round or shrunk from welding. In the end it went better than I thought it was going to.
I think I will land up going with 15" rims so I may just go with ball joints and weld rings for those. The weld rings I have for the ball joints are a good amount beefier and perhaps would not distort when I weld them.
Agonized a long time over wheels recently. There are so many inexpensive and attractive aluminum wheels these days. They seem to be pretty tightly focused on the most common offsets and bolt patterns though. They are also copies of common more expensive units which it turns out are available in more offsets and bolt patterns. It just hurts more when you buy them. The first sets I sort of figured this out on are units from Weld Racing. Some of their wheels are quite expensive so I had started to avoid looking at them.
What I found eventually was the Weld Racing ProStar, a wheel intended for 70's and 80's cars for street and drag strip use.
https://www.weldwheels.com/product/prostar/ It wasn't really the look I wanted but now I have grown fond of them. They cost twice the cheap aluminum cast wheels but they are forged and weigh 14 lbs. instead of 20. These are available in many widths, including 8" with a 6.5" backspace which works out to a 50 mm offset. I talked with their staff and since it is an older design and targeted at the drag strip it is not an ideal choice for something like a Camaro used for road racing. Might be fine on our Locosts though. They are very willing to recommend their modern wheels which cost %50 more for severe cornering use. Both Jegs and Speedway offer identical looking wheels for half the price with load ratings suitable for an SUV. Not so light though and 1" less backspacing.
With a 50mm offset these rims will make for less than an 1" of scrub. I'll have to visit my drawings again to find out exactly.
The more modern forged wheels they make come in the 15x8 with 6.5 backspace and also 5x5 bolt pattern so you could use the light brake options on your Pinto spindle. The stock Pinto rotor is 9.25" and you could get a couple of choices of 10.25" and 10.5" rotors for that. Not sure the Weld wheels will take the 5/8" wheel studs though so need to look a little more. The Pinto and larger 10.25" brakes are about 14-15 lbs. Just haven't finished figuring if they have enough capacity to use on a track. The larger ones are for modified oval tack use but I'm not sure how much braking they do. I finally found AFCO makes an 11" rotor at 18 lbs. instead of the 21 lbs that seems more common...