chrislee2

What the heck were they smoking? All I want to do is replace the wheel studs... should be simple right? It certainly is on the front wheels, I had those done in 10 minutes.

Well I move on to the rear wheels today and what the hell? I've got to pull the whole damn thing off the half-shaft just to get to these three TORX bolts that were torqued to a million newton meters or something all because some hairbrained engineer decided that the parking brake ought to use the same rotor as the rear caliper.
Sheesh.

Needless to say I wasn't prepared for that little snafu and after a day spent taking apart my pass. side rear wheel assembly only to find out that TORX is a _really_ bad choice for a high torque situation.

So I put my rear suspension back together, put my old tires on (snow tires too) and will take the car to a local dealer and tell them what I want to have done. :mad :confused: :nonod:

Does anybody have any other bright ideas about how to get the rear wheel studs off (and new ones on) without dissasembling that whole mess under there???

Thanks in advance for anything helpful.

Chris

C5FAST

The 03 servic manual shows a tool (J 43632) that looks like a C-Clamp. It's used to push te studs out of the wheel hub. You must remove the wheel hub/speed sensor assmbly first. Actually looks pretty easy. I think the problem is you thought the studs were scresed in and they are pressed in. At leat on an 03 they are. :seeya

MTWallet

C5FastHand, he is talking about the torx head bolts that are holding the rear hub assy together on the half shaft, not just the wheel studs. I am pretty sure he knows that the studs press out, because he said that he already did the fronts. Sometimes I would like to strangle a few of their engineers too.

DucaT

If you're going to the trouble of replacing the wheel studs, just take the whole spindle off.

Both ball joints, rear tie rid and the halfshaft retaining nut, I think it''s a 1 5/16 or something like that. Too easy. Then you can work on the whole thing on the bench.

chrislee2

I got to that point and then shredded my torx "socket" trying to get those three bolts out, they must have used locktite red on them or something. The front wheels were soooooo much easier as all I had to do was knock out the studs and put the new ones in without removing the hub assembly at all.

Unfortunately I don't have a good bench to work on to futz around with that hub assembly and I was seriously cursing the engineers who designed that nonsense, especially the drum parking brake. You can't tell me that they couldn't have done something different that would have worked better that that ineffective parking brake assembly. If that assembly wasn't there I could have removed the studs as I did on the front wheels without incident.

Also, you need someway to put that hub assembly in a vise since it twists around on you.
I am willing to bet an impact wrench would have helped me more, but I don't own one and especially don't have any impact torx "sockets".

I had thought of drilling a hole in the dust shield on the parking brake and then removing the studs that way, but there isn't any good places to do that through the brake innards.

What a PITA... :banghead:

Sam Lin

Parking brake is a drum inside the rear rotor's center because they expected this car to be raced and parked with hot brakes. If the parking brake actuated the caliper, holding the caliper against a hot rear rotor is a guaranteed warped rotor. By doing the setup they did, you can park the car and pull the parking brake to hold it in place, yet still let the rotors cool evenly since the swept face isn't contacted by anything.

That's in theory anyway - my parking brake has NEVER worked.

Sam

Jd3

Hey Elvis ! :seeya Where ya been ? Hoping you've got some good news on the employment front and things are looking up (?) :confused:

chrislee2

Hey JD things are ok so far... am working sort of... prospects for more, but I am enjoying havnig the extra time.

I for one hope to get something good employment-wise since blue lightning really needs some TLC in the form of general maintenece.
This damn rear stud thing has put my tubbing project on hold and I haven't been able to mount my 335's. I'm very annoyed at this and would really like to lay in to the engineer(s) who set it up to be so damn difficult to get at the bolts to remove the hub. It's not just a matter of having 120foot pounds on the torx bolts themselves if they were accessable withought removing the whole wheel assembly. The ONLY reason for this nonsense is the non functional parking wannabe brake.

Arggghh!

;)

hope to see you at the autocross.

Dr. Evil

I feel your pain guys. Most things arent that bad to service but every once in a while the engineers well....they come to work on acid or they just caught a mechanic with their girlfriend so they design it like that just to **** us off.

Smoke-N-Shot

:seeya Chris

chrislee2

Yo Nick whassup!