Have you got grease on your wheel hub bolts?

[David JLM]

I took the wheels off my (new) car at the weekend and noticed the bolts had been greased - must have been by CC.

I thought this was a no-no given how it can skew torque measurements. Anyone else noticed this on a recent CC build?

[Jonathan Kay]

Are these bolts or studs and nuts?

NB the factory setting changed recently:

Jonathan

[David JLM]

The studs the wheels mount, which I/we then tighten up the nuts on.

[SamC]

Grease between the stud and the wheel hub is fine. That will help removal if it is ever needed.

The threads that protrude out of the wheel hub that the nuts are fastened onto should be dry and not have grease on them

The reason is both due to reducing thread friction, meaning the load in the stud goes up, and the stirring motion created by a rotating, loaded, wheel has an increased chance of loosening the nuts.

[CAT170]

There is a discussion on this here:

https://www.caterhamlotus7.club/forums/topic/237161-wheel-torque/

When building my Seven I put a small amount of oil on my threads and wiped off excess (so that threads then looked dry but would have retained a small amount) then torqued . The nuts and the studs as supplied in my kit were absolutely bone dry as they were probably cleaned after machining so applying no lubrication at all did not seem a good idea. Standard engineering practice for torque tightening is 'lightly oiled' so I guess Caterham applied grease as proposed in the original post. I also applied a thin film of grease between the hub's mating surface with the aluminium wheel and again wiped most of it off - probably overkill as I don't envisage driving on salty roads and will remove wheels at each service so unlikely to get corrosion and a stuck wheel anyway.  

[7 wonders of the world]

silicone grease on the mating face of the wheel to the hub or drive flange to prevent galvanic corrosion is fine,

Wheel stud threads should be clean and dry, if you add lubrication you should multiply the torque data used by circa 0.8 to prevent over tightening tightening beyond the yield point.