Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums Modifications Wheels & Tires Centric rings??

Oh, so I look dumb? Whatever. Having a ring there only makes sure that the radius from center of ring to center of wheel is the same on all four lugs. There still is an angle phi that exists between the center of the stud, the center of the hub and the center of the wheel until the lugnut is tightened, forcing phi --> 0. Can you see that? OK then, if one holds the wheel onto the hub, supporting from below as I have done on countless autocrosses, and then apply all four lugnuts, then torque them down in a diagonal fashion, a centering ring is simply unnecessary. QED.

I realize that the ring does not center the studs, but they don't need to be centered. And if you hold a wheel (tough with a contour wheel/tire package around 50lbs) up while you do it, so the weight on the nuts is very small, then yes, you can get it centered. Sorry I was rough, nothing personal. You just stated some things that had already been covered. So I believe that you could (say, on a Miata) get wheels centered without rings, if you were very careful, but he is bringing his to a shop to get them done. They are going to throw the wheel on, let it rest on the studs, and crank it down with an air wrench. I use rings on my car, so maybe I'll do an experiment. I usually put on the wheel, and incrementally tighten with a tq wrench, but maybe I'll try to get them misaligned if I skip the rings. Here is my guess as to what will happen:


With rings: There will be nothing I can do to screw it up. The ring does the job of holding the wheel up.

Without rings, being careful: They should be fine. If I use my standard procedure and hold up the wheel, I imagine there will be no imbalance, like you say.

Without rings, tire-chain style: I won't air-wrench them on, b/c I'm not an idiot. I like my rotors straight. What I will do is not hold the wheel, and see if the nuts will center it. I think they won't, even if torqued evenly and properly.

Give me a few weeks, I'll get around to it.

My thought: If you bias your experiment to fail without rings then it will obviously fail. But if you don't "NASCAR" it on there you will be surprised. Just make sure that you don't bind the wheel against the stud if it is at an angle.

The vibration argument is not about the wheel face to hub face angle not being coplanar. The angle between them (within realistic reasoning due to tolerancing) is basically zero when you tighten the f@$Ken bolts. The reason why factory wheels do not use hubcentric rings is because factory wheels have the bore sized to fit the hub pilot.

Aftermarket wheels are a different story!! They usually have ONE bore size and then use the rings to fit them to each car within that wheels bolt pattern family with subsequently smaller hub pilot diamters.

Just because some dufus wrote a web page doesn't mean he can make something gospel. You can try and refute engineering design rules all you want, but it doesn't mean squat. If your so called theory was true then hub faces could be pefrectly flat with no piloting button whatsoever. Damn, this means every car manufacturer out there is wasting billions of dollars machining this feature in. You should patent it and become a millionaire!

Like I said before, it works like this:

Hub pilot and wheel bore center the wheel to the hub

Lugs provide the clamp force between the wheel back face and the hub

The friction between the wheel back-face and the hub face carry the load. NOT THE LUGS AND NOT THE RINGS.

End of story.

[Monty Python] Bring me another moron, this one's brain exploded![/Monty Python]

So the people at The Tire Rack are morons? Please.

No, that's why they supply hubcentric rings with the wheels they sell!

And for the record, last time I checked you didn't need an engineering degree to sell tires.

Good gosh, I'm cheating death without my hubcentering rings!!! Look at the several mm gap between hub and wheel!!! Holy Crap!!!

But if you had the rings you wouldnt need to do the silly bolt tightening procedure of rotating the wheel 50x times and tightening each lug half a turn at a time to try and center the stupid wheel. And thus a lot of people who don't do that with aftermarket wheels and no hub-cnetric rings end up with steering shake bacuase of non alignment.

I never said it wasn't possiblle to not be able to center the wheels with your method. It's just not practical nor easily repeatable.

Wrong. Remove old wheel, put new one on. Hand tighten lugnuts one at a time while holding the wheel in place. Tighten with cordless impact wrench diagonally with a torquestick. Lower vehicle. Do other side as above. Lower vehicle, roll forward and aft to remove suspension bind. Torque nuts with torquewrench. The whole procedure, all four wheels, takes less than ten minutes. Whoopdefrickindoo.