Uncle Bulgaria Posted June 5, 2008 Share Posted June 5, 2008 Grateful for any help and advice on the matter of torque settings for the wheel bolts on the alloy wheels on my Renault Master based Knaus. I've just returned from two weeks in Germany. The motorway route through Belgium and parts of Germany were terrible in terms of the roughness of the road surface. I checked the wheel bolts at the end of a particulary rough day and found several had slackened off, not by much, but enough to make me check them regularly thereafter. I had checked the wheel bolts with the lever bar supplied with the motorhome before leaving the UK and all were tight. Throughout the holiday I found that all four wheels were affected to some degree, but I didn't determine whether it was the same bolts each time - suggesting it wasn't tightened sufficiently - or different bolts on each occasion. Back in the UK I popped along to the supplier who had contacted Renault and was given a figure of 175 Newton Metres as the torque setting for the alloys on the Master. All bolts were found to be tight at that torque setting. My reason in raising this topic is (1) have other forum members had similar problems, and (2) as I'm never fully happy about accepting just one source of advice on a safety critical subject as wheel bolt torque settings, do any members have any comments on the figure of 175 Newton Metres?. Regards to all. Richard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
colin Posted June 5, 2008 Share Posted June 5, 2008 The torque setting will normaly be dependant on dia. of bolts, I used to have a Wolfrace guide to Torque settings for alloy wheels but had a quick look and can't find it at moment. This is a wild guess on part using my very bad memory, but 175N-M sounds about figure for 5/8" bolts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Derek Uzzell Posted June 6, 2008 Share Posted June 6, 2008 Richard: The first thing to confirm is that the bolts being used are the correct ones for the wheels fitted to your Renault Master as the bolt-specification can differ according to whether wheels are steel or alloy. Assuming the bolts are correct, then I suggest you contact Renault's technical department yourself to check the 175Nm figure you've been given. I fully understand your reluctance to accept single-source information in this instance (my own mind-set leads me to automatically disbelieve anything I'm told unless it's provable), but, if Renault confirm 175Nm to you, then you've really little option but to accept it. 175Nm is a fairly hefty 'pull' and, as you haven't been using a torque-wrench to tighten your motorhome's wheel-bolts, you may just have been under-tightening them. As you are probably aware, wheel-bolts/nuts need to be tightened in a prescribed order and the face of the bolt/nut in contact with the wheel's surface should not be greased. When I bought my current Ford Transit-based motorhome I wanted to find out the wheel-nut torque-setting as this information wasn't in the handbook. The local Ford agent told me 200Nm but seemed a mite uncertain, so I phoned Ford's Technical Centre (at £1 per minute) and was also told 200Nm. Only later (as a result of seeing it mentioned on the Transit forum) did I find out that the 200Nm figure was actually stamped on the wheel-nuts themselves. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Uncle Bulgaria Posted June 9, 2008 Author Share Posted June 9, 2008 Thanks to both Colin and Derek. I'll contact Renaut technical. Richard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BGD Posted June 12, 2008 Share Posted June 12, 2008 Just one other thing to look out for, as I have seen it before (on alloy car wheels): If your alloy wheels are new (or newish) and the bolts have only been tightened once, ie when the wheels were first mounted, then it is possible to have a tiny amount of "spread" in the "V" shaped top of the wheel nut holes. This is because alloy is a much softer metal than steel, at at high torques the steel bolt heads can actually spread the holes that they are sitting in a little. This can also happen if the angle of the shoulder on the wheel nuts is not exactly the same as the angle on the "V" part of the alloy wheel that the bolts are tightened against. Check you have correctly angled wheel nuts, and then tighten them youself to correct torque now, and them monitor them....it may be that the initial spreading has now finished. You can get little plastic clips that go over the head of the wheel nut which (if you point them all towars the centre of the wheel) then give you an instant visual indication if one has slackened at all. You can achieve exactly the same effect simply using an indelible felt tip pen to mark lines on each nut head. If you've got alloy wheels bolted to steel hubs, then remember also the potential chemical "binding" effect of these two metals......whilst you should NEVER grease wheel nuts, I was taught that you you should apply a VERY THIN smear of coppaslip to the face of the steel wheel hub before mounting the wheel, to stop them "welding" together over time. As a general point, I've always personally thought of alloy wheels as a damned expensive, and frankly useless, money-pit of an extra. They cost a bomb, they deform so easily, they are much more fragile, they get pitted/scratched so easily, they get damaged by tyre-changing equipment, salt attacks them terribly as soon as any of their laquer becomes scratched, other people steal them, etc etc. I'll always be sticking with steel wheels; but each to their own I guess. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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