Is 8 to 9 Full Turns Enough for Trailer Wheel Lug Nuts

Question:

I have an Eagle tri-axle trailer. I added Centramatic Dynamic Wheel Balancers to my TieDown Engineering disc brakes. To do this I had a 10mm hub-centric spacer made to add some distance between the Balancer and the wheel. This reduced the threads available for the lug nut. I know have about 8-9 FULL turns of the lug nut. My question is: is 8-9 FULL turns enough?

asked by: Michael

Helpful Expert Reply:

This is a tough one. I did a little math and if you have 1/2 inch studs on the hub then every full rotation of a lug nut is approximately 1-1/2 inches of rotational travel and on standard 1/2"-20 threads the distance from one thread to the next is approximately 0.05 inches. That would mean for 8 to 9 turns the lug nut would be gripping 0.4 inches to 0.45 inches of the wheel stud. That isn't very much but it could be enough if you were to use blue Loctite # LT37643 to prevent the lug nuts from backing out. Blue Loctite will allow the lug nuts to still be removed with regular hand tools.

Or you could go with longer studs for your hubs (as long as the ones you have in the hub can be either driven out or screwed out). We have lots of studs, see link, depending on the size you might need.

expert reply by: Michael H