Scary Faulty Parts
Before the 2013 trip to Le Man I sheered a nearside rear wheel stud whilst tightening the wheel. This I put down to what looked like a faulty stud. A new one was ordered and fitted at the trip to Le Man went ahead without issue. It’s now July and on a run to pick up my kid from school I noticed a knocking from the rear end. Parking up and taking a look around I discovered to my horror two broken near side rear wheel studs. Only two studs to do two miles at 10 MPH made for a scary ride home. Research on the WWW came back with possible causes for stud failures and seemed more prominent on the near side. Spigot rings, incorrect torque settings and wrong size and angled studs and lugs all featured in the list of common stud failures.
What didn’t feature was a very poorly manufactured concentric wheel spacer!
Catastrophic failure of two studs on the wheel spacer.
The cause was very badly manufactured stud fixings. In the first instance the countersink at the bottom of the counter bore was not deep enough to allow the fixing nut to recess below the surface of the spacer. This was only 1mm but enough to stop the wheel clamping correctly.
The second cause of the failure was that once counter bore had not even had a countersink set into the bottom. It had been completely missed during original manufacture.
This resulted on the wheel spacer fastening nut remaining very proud (as shown above) of the clamping surface.
On examination of the wheel the scares were clear top see. What should have been simple dirty areas, caused by the mounting hole, were in fact scores in the wheel mating surface. As the clamping surface area was now just the four nut heads the wheel studs were asked to carry out the impossible and take the full wheel load, wheel shock and torque forces. Surprisingly they managed to survive this for several thousand miles before crying enough!
Answer:
Buy British or German but don’t by Chinese manufactured items. Almost every single “Made in China” component on this project has had to be modified or replaced from lighting to trim. But this was exceptionally bad. Just incredible dangerous shoddy manufacture and quality control!!!!!
OK in hindsight I should have spotted the problem during the build and during wheel changes ect. But it is not one of those things you really going to look for. Fighting a heavy wheel into place and bolting it up on your own is not the time to be looking for 1-