Hello -
I think I finally cracked the problem of my alloy wheels not being amenable to racing disk mods. Here is my normal OEM alloy wheel:
I found this serving tray at Smart & Final for a couple of bucks :
It was almost perfect in size, but it needed to be trimmed, so I dremelled off the edge. This was time consuming but accurate because there was a groove in the plate for me to follow :
(the leftover circle-piece makes a great hoola-hoop for your cat,
)
I took off the center cap and removed the faux plastic lug nuts that are used to attach the center cap to the *real* lug nuts (which are double threaded for this purpose) :
I toyed with the idea of using T-Nuts on the *inside* of the plastic lug nuts, but abandoned it (they are really intended for soft wood, not plastic) :
I measured the diameter between the lug nut holes and found it to be 3.92". Then I hand-drilled 4 perfectly aligned holes in the serving tray (the pattern on the tray made it very easy to be accurate). Here is a picture before mounting. You can see where everything will attach :
The plastic lug nuts are recessed into the alloy wheel, so I used rubber furniture feet as spacers. The center cap is gone because it's "little dome" center pushes out the serving tray. It's better to have the serving tray rest on the now-present "circular inner disk" of the alloy wheel that you see here :
And here it is installed :
Benefits :
- Cheap. The disk is less than $3. The nuts and bolts do add up because I need 16 sets for all 4 wheels. But that's ok if it's robust.
- 100% reversible. Only "mod" to the car is a hole in each plastic lug nut. Car is otherwise untouched.
- Blackout look makes it easy to ignore brake dust and matches other black window/pillar elements in the S-Series design. I can more than live with that. It also helps to hide a valve stem hole if/when I dremel one.
- Adaptable mod. You can apply this to cars with alloys or steelies. The steelies would require lug nuts that have double threads.
- Disk material independent. You can use metal pizza pans if you want to. I chose the plastic serving tray because it matched the diameter of my wheel. I could even adapt *real* racing disks to attach with this method (not the ones with grabby scratchy teeth).
- Serving tray is very light. I am not worried about wheel balancing or it flying off and hurting anything.
- The additional nuts and bolts are symmetric, so I am not worried about wheel balancing.
- I think it will be very robust (pending testing,
). It attaches in 4 places, so I have a high level of confidence that it will not fly off.
- Even my wife thinks it looks good!
Problems :
- The plastic serving tray is that cheap brittle plastic. It's the right shape but not the right kind of plastic. I expect that it will fail in due time. However, my main goal is to prove the mod, so I don't mind.
- The rubber furniture feet are too big, so the tray is not actually touching the alloy wheel. I need to trim the feet so that the tray can be more recessed. However, I don't want the rubber feet to be *too* shallow. Otherwise, I may crack the tray. It also needs to be more flush in order to get through car washes that grab the tire and pull the car along.
- No hole for valve stem. I can dremel a hole or take it off every time. Right now I am testing, so I am not in a rush to dremel the hole. Again, it's brittle plastic, so I am going to leave it be for now.
- I think the better solution is to have a threaded nut *inside* the plastic lug nut. This was what the T-Nut was for. In another iteration I plan to try a K-Lock nut like this :
Nuts, K-Lock nuts at Bolt Depot
This should allow for a "flusher" mount. Currently the 4 attaching bolts stick out about 1/4".
(I'm going to revise the pros and cons you see above, but these are the biggies. I'm hungry so it's off to dinner
... revisions made)
CarloSW2