<VV> Fuel Leak / lug nuts

[Joel McGregor]

In the US the Budd system was inch and the "new" hub center is metric.  22mm I think.
I love metric.  If you can count you already know how to use metric.  No learning.  Feet make no sense at all.  The only reason it is meaningful is that we grew up with it.  If you grew up with metric 1.7 meters would make just as much sense.   It burns me that US auto manufacturers decided they needed to be different when they went to metric and they are all different from Japanese metric.  Lots of 15mm and 18mm wrenches needed when Japanese metric uses 14 and 17.  Thread pitches are mostly different also.

Joel McGregor

________________________________________
From: Hugo Miller [Hugo at aruncoaches.co.uk]
Sent: Friday, September 28, 2018 11:48 AM
To: Joel McGregor; virtualvairs at corvair.org
Subject: Re: <VV> Fuel Leak / lug nuts

And of course some people think that if they do the nuts up tight enough
they won't come off. They then stretch the stud beyond its elastic limit as
you lose most of the 'spring' force that keeps it all together. That's if
they haven't stretched the threads first.
I have never used a torque wrench on wheel nuts on my buses - I do them up
by feel - they don't need to be too tight if all faces are clean and the
threads are not stiff. I never check them, and I've never had a problem
ever. The plus side of using lube on the threads is that you can get them
apart again.
Another sort of related comment - I notice that coarse (UNC) threads are
widely used on American vehicles. In the UK we used to use BSF (British
Standard Fine) and Whitworth (which co-incidentally has the same pitch as
UNC). Then we went over to UNF threads, with UNC only being used on the
bottom of studs or in aluminium. Now of course everything is metric, which I
hate. It is an artificial system imposed by Napoleon on the countries he
conquered - every measurement is supposed to be a tiny fraction of the
circumference (or maybe diameter?) of the Earth. (Of course, if it is a
fraction of the circumference, it cannot also be a fraction of the
diameter!). Traditional measurements, on the other hand, are based on the
human body. The decimal system is divisible only by 2 and 5, whereas the
traditional 'duodecimal' system divides by 2,3,4 and 6.  Plus the fact that
centimetres are not included in the S.I. metric system, so you get
measurements given in hundreds of millimetres. If I told you I was 5' 10"
tall, you would know immediately what that looked like. If I told you I was
1.778 metres you wouldn't have a clue.
Ok, rant over ;)