<VV> Loose axle

[Hugo Miller]

Was it a stock wheel? Left-side wheel nuts (lug nuts) should be 
left-hand thread, and on quality cars in the UK (Rolls Royce, Bristol) 
they were at one time. This is to counter the effects of precession, 
which is too complicated to explain in a short e-mail, but it is the 
reason the left pedal on a bicycle will have a left-hand thread holding 
the pedal on, which seems counter-intuitive, as the rotation of the 
pedal around the shaft will tend to unscrew it. But the forces of 
precession act in the opposite direction, and they are reckoned to be 
stronger. Basically, if you imagine the pedal being very loose on a 
plain shaft with no bearings in it, the shaft will tend to 'walk' around 
the inside of the pedal as it rotates, and that is precession.
There was and still is a debate in the UK about what the government 
calls "Wheel-loss syndrome" on coaches. Typically of governments 
everywhere, instead of fixing the problem, they call it a 'syndrome'.
Basically, the story is this; traditionally, all British-built 
commercial vehicles used conical wheel nuts (like a car) to locate the 
wheels, and more importantly, they used left-hnad threads on the 
left-side nuts. So far so good. But then we adopted the European system 
of spigot-fixed wheels, using flat-faced nuts and, more importantly, 
they used right-hand threads all round. And the left rear (twin) wheels 
immediately began falling off all over the place. The government even 
launched a competition to find a way to keep the wheels on. Idiots! All 
they have to do is use left-hand threads and the problem goes away. I 
did try to explain about precession to the relevant govt dept, but I 
don't think they understood it. Anyway, our left rear wheels are still 
falling off, only now it's not an engineering problem but a syndrome.


On 2020-03-06 08:58, Byron LaMotte wrote:
> Yikes, I thought it was just me. I lost a LR wheel at 60 mph.
> Fortunately there was a grassy area to the left to move over to for a
> soft landing. 
>