Left hand wheel nuts??

Is this your next anti-left wing thread?

;-)

Helps to stop them loosening.

Only ever heard of it on lorries. How old/big is the car? Wouldn?t put it past RR doing it as obviously no owner is going to dirty their hands on the wheel nuts when they have a man for that sort of thing. ;-)

Tim

What vehicle? Sounds weird to me. Why only the rear?

Knock-on hubs are of course handed. But I was interested to discover they are not always the same way around: this from a UK sports car forum

"Yes the Elan knock ons are the opposite way around to all other knock ons. It's all abit complicated to explain the physics of it all. Basically it's dependent on whether the cone on the spinner fits into or onto the cone on the wheel. Splined wire wheel hubs have an external cone. The Elan steel wheels have an internal cone. These combinations effectively have an influence over the "self tightening effect" & are dependent on which side of the car they are fitted to. There is a story about Chapman explaining the theory of this by placing and spinning an egg cup inside a napkin ring to show the influece of counter rotation to his "lesser engineers"

HaHa! Give the gent a coconut! :-D

Rolls/Bentley certainly did on the S series cars up until the 60s. Not sure about later models.

And if you stripped a thread in a nut, the LH thread ones cost more than the RH ones. Don't ask how I know.

It is common on a centre lock wheel. But not so much with stud fixing types.

That's what I was getting at. I can't see the point unless it's one single securing fixture on the axis of the drive shaft.

It could be Rolls originally had centre fix wheels. So when they moved over to studs, kept the left hand direction to avoid confusing the chauffeur. They did similar with their first stalk indicators. On the wrong side due to the column gearchange on their autos. But swapped over with later models to what was then the norm.

But it was only on the *rear* wheel.

Also, knock-on hubs were AFAIK always asymmetric: you hammered the square face to knock them off, but the angled one to put them back.

On 17/03/2022 14:30, Dave Plowman (News) wrote: <snip>

And that's a whole different issue.

So which side do you consider the correct side? My Nissan has it on RHS and looking in owners manual shows this is for RHD and they make a different set of stalks for LHD with it on LHS. Mazda and Toyota put it on LHS, at least for Europe including UK.

My view is it should be RHS in RHD and LHS for LDH. that enables the driver to indicate while changing gear.

Um, we don?t know that. Doom never said anything about the N/S front. It would be crazy just to have it on one rear wheel. Having LH threaded nuts on the N/S is at least a real thing on some vehicles, usually heavy, older lorries.

Tim

IIRC, most UK cars had the indicator stalk on the right until the late

70s (enabling drivers to simultaneously change gear with the left hand, and indicate with the right little finger while still holding the wheel). After the change (which I presume was in the 'interests of global standardization'), we soon adapted - but some Japanese were the last to conform. I recall being pleasantly surprised when I hired a Toyota Corolla in Ireland, and found it was 'right hand wink'.

I'd guess someone has fitted a non standard rear axle.

Never seen the type that are a nut?

If it was also used on trucks, perhaps some sense - if at least in theory.

I had an Austin 1800 (Land crab) The driveshafts had splines to the hub, and secured by a nut. Same thread both sides. The left hand one gave problems on two occasions.

Not on a car, unless you are counting the ones on racing cars. (I have used flogging spanners on pressure vessel flange nuts).

They were around at the same time as the more usual 'wing' types. But both usually had an arrow to indicate undo direction.

I haven't had occasion to remove the front n/s wheel yet, so that may well be (and presumably is) LH-threaded as well. One unfortunate aspect of this skulduggery is that my torque wrench doesn't appear to function the wrong way around, which is a PITA. So I could only hazard a guess when it came to replacing the nuts. :(

I think the truth is that a fair number of cars sold in this country are designed and built as LHD, and the RHD variant for the UK is built as an afterthought.

If you have a look under the bonnet of a lot of Fords you might notice that the brake servo is mounted on the bulkhead - on the passenger side.

Its possible that the entire steering column assembly on most cars is designed and built as LHD (including the ignition key / steering lock assembly) and that little or no thought is given to ergonomics.

Also ... I suspect that this has been going on for quite a while. My

1966 Mk 2 Jaguar has a blanking plate on the passenger side of the bulkhead, to take the brake and clutch master cylinders - and it looks to me like the "natural" place for them. But on my RHD model the master cylinders are fitted tight up against the battery, in such a way that you need to either remove them or the bonnet in order to get the battery out.

I believe that some Series 3 E Type Jaguars were fitted with wire wheels which were secured by a nut which had no "ears" and that some sort of (possibly octagonal) flogging spanner thingy was used to tighten them.

This might have been a requirement for the US market - but a lot of later E Types had steel wheels anyway.