Thread: Steel rims on camper

From my experience, wheels only sit on the studs, hence one of the resons for chamfering (S?) on the wheel holes, the nut has the matching chamfer.

What Chops said.

Nothings ever simple with you hey Ean,,

but,
the LR wheel is designed to sit on an LR hub,, not sure about the D3 but the D2 wheels dont sit on studs,,
I have no idea how they match up to Alco stuff

Yep what Chops said, I have Gecko D3/D4 steel rims on my camper, I was hoping the D3 rims I have would fit, but they don't, D2 and P38 alloy rims fit, I had to modify the wheel nuts though, after a couple of broken studs(alloys need the centre hole to locate properly) I changed to the steel rims, all good now.



Baz.

AFAIK It became a legal requirement for cars somewhere in the 90s to have "hub centric" fitment. This followed on from manufacturers doing it anyway to reduce NVH by having more accurate positioning of the wheels.

For example RRC mags never had a centre hole anywhere near the hub spindle but D2 mags are hub centric and D3 and so on.

AFAIK this does not apply to trailers. It really cannot as ALKO 10 inch drums for example have a tapered cast centre spindle which would be impossible to have a hub centric wheel on.
Funny my mate who is building a Marina 6cylinder classic regularity trials car just tried to have a set of old ROH composite wheels balanced and the stupid tyre place tried to do it with a cone. No hope of course as the centre hole is cast and may not be in the centre.
Regards Philip A

I had to modify the wheel nuts though, after a couple of broken studs(alloys need the centre hole to locate properly) I changed to the steel rims, all good now

Funny, I went around Oz last year including 1000Km on the GRR with my 1tonne camper and no problem with D2 alloys on UK sourced RRC to D2 adaptors. The adaptors of course come with D2 size studs. No hub centre .

Methinks your studs are too small for the weight you are putting on them.
The hubs look a bit light duty.Look like 9inch drums?.
And why did you modify the wheel nuts?
Regards Philip A

Originally Posted by PhilipA

Funny, I went around Oz last year including 1000Km on the GRR with my 1tonne camper and no problem with D2 alloys on UK sourced RRC to D2 adaptors. The adaptors of course come with D2 size studs. No hub centre .

Methinks your studs are too small for the weight you are putting on them.
The hubs look a bit light duty.Look like 9inch drums?.
And why did you modify the wheel nuts?
Regards Philip A

Yes they are 9" drums with M14 X 1.5 studs on both sets of drums, first ones and the current ones, I took the studs from the first set of drums and put them in the disc hubs.

They were too long, they were locating onto the hub and not the rim, I took about 3mm of the wheel nut and it was all good after that, but here's the thing, before this we had done, the simpson, the Cape, the Gulf, countless High country trips, the Flinders and so on, easily 150,000 Ks without an issue.
After thinking about it, the only thing that changed, was going to Disc brakes, at the time I couldn't understand why I needed to shorten the wheel nuts, especially considering all the Ks we had done before this, also the wheel nuts were getting harder to put on and remove, still in that time we only had one broken stud.

After selling the D2, we picked up the D4 and did a few trips, still with the D2 alloys and the shortened wheel nuts, after we got the D4, we needed to go to 17" rims, to get a better range of tyres for remote travel, that's when we changed to BMW X5 rims on the D4, because of that I wanted to put X5 rims on the trailer as well, initially they were not bad, a bit stiff to put the nuts on but not to bad, but after a couple of trips they started to get really hard to get to fit properly on the camper and get centered and at times really hard to get the wheel nuts out.

I only did a couple of trips with the disc brakes and BMW rims, mainly because I destroyed a hub going away, I decided to go back to drums, I found it really hard to find Commodore disc hubs, they are not an off the shelf item in the bush, after getting back home we went back to drums and also we managed to score some D3 factory alloys, they dont fit as you know, so steel rims went on.

Anyway, thinking about it after going back to drums, I have a feeling that the discs were not actually Commodore hubs, but HQ disc hubs, which are 120.65mm PCD as apposed to 120mm PCD for the commodore and why we had all those issues and why I shortened the wheel nuts, if I had just stuck to the Drum brakes, we would not have had an issue at all.

Sorry it's a bit long winded, but I needed to explain the whole story, I want to go to exlectric brakes, I'm pretty confident Commodore 10" drums with M14 X 1.5 studs will be OK for the job, I should be able to put the X5 rims back on too, now that I know why we had all those problems, but for now the override brakes and steel rims will do, I might even put the X5 rims back on to trial them, just to be sure.

Lesson learnt,

Baz.

The trials and tribulations Eh!

Just the point I was trying to make is that alloy rims should not need hub centering as long as the studs are the correct length IE LR studs and the nuts are OEM D2/3/4 nuts with the flange and they are torqued up correctly.

In my case the adaptors I got from UK are D3 adaptors and the hub centric flange is too big for my D2 alloys so I ground them down.

It sounds to me in your case that the studs were still bottoming in the nuts . D2 nuts are not threaded all the way up,as there is about a 5MM length at the top without thread, and that could explain why the studs became difficult.

I found this out when I tried to use a D2 wheel nut on the spare to replace the locking nut, which believe it or not has different nuts which are threaded all the way up , and have the outward dimple.
The best way I guess to be sure you are tightening on the wheel and not the hub, is to measure the emerged length of the stud on a car wheel and cut the stud off to that length .
You must also use the OEM mag wheel nuts as I am still not clear whether you used OEM mag wheel nuts or just ground down tapered nuts which is a definite NO NO . The mag wheel nuts have a large diameter which fits snugly in the hole in the wheel and has a large washer/flange to spread the clamping load.

Regards Philip A