Post
by dilvoy » Sun Dec 10, 2017 9:53 am
The run flats are also bead locks at the same time. They are designed to be the perfect width so when you tighten the bolts for the two wheel halves, they put outwards pressure on the inner parts of the tire beads. I've put a couple of twelve bolters together with hand tools and it is in no way a loose fit inside the tire. From memory about half inch of squeeze was needed, but that was twenty years ago. Now I use an impact wrench so the feel is no longer there for the compression of the rubber. There is a special lube that is in a plastic packet inside of every Humvee wheel that is used to keep the tire from catching fire while being driven flat. That stuff is evenly spread inside of the tire after the bag breaks. The early run flats that were used with the eight bolt Humvee wheels, were made of magnesium and maybe other metals too. Those were for the Bias Ply tires and those wheels are weak. I don't think any mixing of those into a radial setup should be done. There is also the issue of the two wheel halves being positioned by the twelve or twenty four studs. It is not a perfect fitment by any means. AM General put out some sort of washers as a fix for balance issues on Hummers, that would be placed beneath two or three wheel half nuts while a wheel was being assembled to keep the outer wheel disk half better lined up with the inner wheel part. Just think of a flat copper washer that was stamped to have a protrusion at it's center hole enough to fill the space between the wheel half stud and the hole for the stud. Since the outer wheel half is a disk and is what is bolted to the spindle, the whole rest of the wheel, runflat and half the tire are working against those studs so maybe there is movement at that point instead of the run flat being the only thing that might move. Final torque of those wheel half studs is over 100 lb. ft.
George D. Paxinos
M998
M1123A2