fart_canon

iTrader: (20)

I was eating while reading your comment and food ended up on my comp screen! great response.

350z-Jim

iTrader: (1)

From what I have heard and been told from pretty major guys who race, hub centric is not really important, well at least not the way we think it is.

Most hub centric wheels and/or hub centric rings are only for mounting purposes so its easy to get the wheel on the car. Not to center the wheels. That is the job of the lug nuts.

Modern cars have cone tapered seats or expensive cars have better ball seat lug nuts. As you tighten down the lug nuts, in the proper sequence they will pull the wheels into proper alignment. This is why it's always recommended to torque the wheels after installing them. This achieves a patterned tightening down process kind of like what you do with head studs. You first put the lugs on sort tight to get them all on, then tighten them down but obviously not tighter than what the final torque value will be. Then your torque them to the proper figure. So you have at least a two step tightening process putting the wheels on. With a tapered seat, and especially on a 5 bolt lug system this pulls the wheels perfectly into alignment. Any good tire shop, or good OEM dealership will always torque wheels on a car when they are removed and later re-installed for this very reason. Plastic centering rings are only just centering rings.

Remember that there is always a clearance of a few thousands of an inch between the hub centric piece on the hub and the hub of the rim. Enough that you can sit it on and spin it to find the bolt holes. If this clearance was too tight you would literally have to hammer the wheel on to the hub and it would never later spin so you could line up the bolt holes. So this clearance technically is enough to leave the wheels out of alignment anyway.

When you put a wheel on a perfectly hub centric hub and later tighten the bolts down and torque them, it's the lug nuts that center the wheel perfectly on the hub. Technically the hub centric ring on the hub is not touching the inside of the wheel at all if it's perfectly centered because there is clearance between the hub centric ring on the hub and the inside of the wheel.

So really, a properly installed 5 bolt wheel torqued with proper lug nuts will be centered regardless of weather there is a hub centric ring or not. They are more for ease of installation and not really so much for centering the wheels. That's the lug nuts job.

I am not an engineer nor do I run a multi million dollar race team, so this information is not mine it's simply the understandings and grumblings from much smarter people I know. It makes sense to me.

Any engineers here or people who actually know 100% about these types of things that can chime in?

medic165

iTrader: (2)

ohhhh yea.

naughty240

iTrader: (3)

They would fit my sedan.

jray8

in 4 pics, this should be good