[alfa] Re: Pulling Milano Steering Wheel

[George Graves <gmgraves@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is good advice. When I tried to pull my original GTV-6 wheel, I 
found that the bolts which fit the stock 6mm holes were too small. The 
wheel was on so tight that the bolts both stretched and bent over 
(grade 8's yet!), and the tighter I screwed-down the jack screw on the 
wheel puller, the further the wheel puller leaned over until finally, 
it kicked out with a loud bang. What I ended-up doing was drilling and 
tapping the wheel for 8mm bolts and then using a washer and a nut on 
the underside of the wheel. After a herculean effort  winding on the 
jack screw of the wheel puller with a breaker bar on the wrench, the 
wheel finally popped off. I replaced it with a used leather rimmed 
stock GTV-6 wheel (the 'wooden" one which came on the car being too 
slippery for my hands). When I put the leather wheel on, I tightened 
the center nut on the splined shaft only to 10 ft/lbs of torque. 
Recently I bought a smaller diameter wheel (I have power steering on my 
GTV-6 now, I don't need the leverage afforded by a bigger wheel any 
more, but I sure can use the extra knee room from a smaller one) with a 
bigger rim cross section for better grip. The second wheel came off 
with just a bit of violent rocking motion of the wheel back and forth, 
so the lightly torqued center nut is the key. I cannot stress this too 
strongly. The splined shaft is tapered, it doesn't take much pressure 
to seat the wheel properly on it. There is simply no reason to torque 
it down hard, it's not going anywhere. Good luck.

George Graves
'86 GTV-6 3.0 'S'



On Apr 1, 2004, at 10:30 PM, alfa-digest wrote:

>
> Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 20:46:53 -0500
> From: Joe Elliott <jee@domain.elided>
> Subject: [alfa] re: Pulling Milano Steering Wheel
>
> Are the supplied bolts long enough?  If not, get longer grade 8 bolts
> from a hardware store.  Find the two 6mm holes (presumably behind
> gray things).  Drill out the holes in the wheel to accept
> considerably larger bolts than the stock 6mm holes accomodate.  If
> you want to be fancy, you can tap threads in your new holes, but
> that's really not necessary with a Milano because you can reach
> behind the wheel and put nuts on the bolts, which work a lot better
> than trusting threaded holes in the wheel anyway.  Put the big nut on
> halfway before you actually pull the wheel because you don't want to
> the wheel to fly off and hit you in the face.
>
> Joe Elliott
> '82 GTV-6
--
to be removed from alfa, see /bin/digest-subs.cgi
or email "unsubscribe alfa" to majordomo@domain.elided