<VV> Concentric wheel spacer necessary?

Wed Nov 29 10:18:15 EST 2017

I feel I should weigh in on this. my 1964 Spyder has 16" Dayton wire wheel
conversion. Recently the left rear wheel left the car at 60 mph. A little
too much drama! Fortunately I was able to drive onto some grass with
minimal damage and recovered the wheel. Now I have little confidence and
wish to go back to bolt on wheels but can't find 4 lug wheels to my liking
and it seems difficult to change over to 5 lug. Found some 15" wheels that
I like but they are 5 lug.

On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 2:14 AM, Hugo Miller via VirtualVairs <
virtualvairs at corvair.org> wrote:

> #### That is amazing! The UK government has commissioned university
> studies to try to find the cause of "wheel loss syndrome" and they're still
> scratching their heads about it - and you've just summed it up in one neat
> sentence. The back wheels of my coaches have EIGHT surfaces all clamped
> together with one set of lug nuts (you have the outside face of the hub
> flange; two faces on the brake drum; two faces of a spacer they have fitted
> for some reason; two faces of the inner wheel; one face of the outer
> wheel). If you have .010" of rust, dirt or worse still, paint, on each of
> those surfaces, you end up with almost a tenth of an inch gap, once the
> constant heating & cooling, braking and acceleration have taken their toll
> & rubbed it all off. No wonder they fall off!
>    My solution is to thoroughly clean all the faces, and to spray them
> with cavity wax rust preventative or similar (this is the UK where we use a
> lot of salt on the roads), and to grease the studs. Then I fit Ric-clips to
> make sure the nuts don't come loose (they're a figure-of-eight spring clip
> in case they don't exist in the States - equivalent to Zafety-lug clips or
> whatever they're called). I never use a torque wrench - just do them up by
> feel. Never had a problem.
>    The reason this was never a problem with the old-style fixings is that
> the wheels were located by cones on the studs and on the nuts, and weren't
> in contact with anything else.
>    That system you describe, with the square end on the stud or whatever
> it is, I've seen that on American trucks, but it does not exist in the UK.
> British coaches have 1+5/16" lug nuts, only we have to call them 33mm now.
> European commercials, on the other hand, have 32mm nuts!
>    One thing that does concern me is that I've watched the tire fitters in
> the US truck stops do the lug nuts up (dry) with an air gun, then just let
> the jack down & drive off. I like to feel the nuts going up.
>    As an aside, I  recently bought an old car as a runabout for a friend
> here in the UK. It was advertised as having a collapsed wheel bearing,
> which had been diagnosed by the AA (=AAA). I drove it back & I thought it
> sounded like the wheel nuts were loose, but I didn't have a jack to test
> them, or a lever to pry the wheel trim off. I drove it about thirty miles
> home and sure enough, when I popped the wheel trim off, the nuts were all
> loose! Nothing else wrong with it! It had damaged the holes in the wheel,
> but the studs were still ok - just a slight mark on them.
>    The reason I tell this story is to illustrate just how much it takes
> for a wheel to fall off a car. I reckon I could have done another hundred
> miles before they fell off.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message----- From: Joel McGregor via VirtualVairs
> Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2017 4:05 AM
>
> To: Virtualvairs at corvair.org
> Subject: Re:  Concentric wheel spacer necessary?
>
> I read up on the wheels falling off and it's a problem with too many
> surfaces being clamped together.  Note that the front single wheels don't
> fall off.
> You've got the hub surface then the brake drum and then 2 wheels that all
> have to be clamped together.  Any rust, dirt, paint or whatever on that
> many surfaces is too compressible to overcome with the maximum clamping
> force of the studs.  They are fine if you re torque after the recommended
> 150 miles. The previous lug piloted system used a nut for each wheel
> instead of one for the pair so they had one less pair of mating surfaces to
> clamp but twice as many nuts to torque.  My truck has the old system and
> torqueing 20 on each dual is a real beating.  That system also uses 4
> different lug nuts.  As Hugo mentioned they are LH thread on the left side
> and RH on the right.  The front and rear outers are 1-1/8"  The rear inners
> are much smaller  IIRC 3/4.  The nuts for the inner are the studs for the
> outer hence the size difference.
> Joel McGregor
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hugo Miller [mailto:Hugo at aruncoaches.co.uk]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2017 2:34 AM
> To: Joel McGregor <joel at joelsplace.com>; Virtualvairs at corvair.org
> Subject: Re: <VV> Concentric wheel spacer necessary?
>
> #### I've owned & operated large buses & coaches in the UK all my life.
> The old British coaches, as with all cars of that era, had conical lug nuts
> & countersunk holes in the wheels. The wheels were located solely by the
> studs & nuts. They also had left-hand threads on the left side of the
> vehicle.
> Then they changed to the European system of having a register on the hub
> to locate the wheel, and flat lug nuts. Right-hand threads all round. Now
> we have a thing called "Wheel-loss syndrome" where the twin wheels on the
> left rear keep falling off. That's progress, I guess, - if it ain't broke,
> fix it till it is.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joel McGregor via VirtualVairs
> Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2017 5:43 AM
> To: 'Virtualvairs at corvair.org'
> Subject: Re:  Concentric wheel spacer necessary?
>
> Big trucks use either hub centered or stud centered on disk wheels but not
> both.  They carry a lot of weight so I'm guessing that using normal Corvair
> studs and tapered seats is more than good enough.
> When I bought my '64 Spyder I ran it pretty had before really looking it
> over and it had a nut missing on a rear wheel.  3 held it together fine so
> I'm thinking 4 is plenty.
>
> Joel McGregor
>
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