[chopper]

OK, I need some adult supervision here. The last time I had the wheels off my car was the about three months ago when I pulled the rear end to replace the seals and output shaft bearings. Note that I have the aluminum pin-drive wheels with aluminum spinners. When I reassembled the car after that maintenance, I used copious amounts of anti-seize on the threads and the mating surface between the spinners and the wheels. I tightened each spinner with two or three whacks of my dead-blow hammer and safety wired the spinners to the wheels. As part of the routine maintenance, I also pulled the fronts and lubricated them at the same time. This is just as I've done on the car for the past six years.

Last weekend, I decided to perform some relatively minor maintenance on the car, which required pulling of the left rear wheel. When I tried to remove the spinner, I found it frozen. The removal odyssey then began. I retrieved my FinishLine spinner tool and tried to use that, only to find that with the car sitting on the epoxy-painted floor and the wife holding the brake pedal as firmly as she could, I only succeeded in rotating the entire wheel assembly. I then pushed the car onto the street where I could get a better grip between the tire and the asphalt. I pushed the steel bar midway through the tool and supported the outer end of the tool with a jackstand. With my neighbor sitting in the car holding the brakes, and both his wife and mine standing on one side of the bar, I pushed up on the other end with my floor jack and was finally able to get the spinner to break loose. As a precaution, I checked the other three wheels and found all of them frozen. Each eventually came loose using similar tactics, although the left rear was the worst of the lot. In the process, we bent the steel rod enough that I was unable to extract it from the tool. A buddy from work took the tool, with bar still attached, to his home shop, cut the bar off on both sides of the tool, and pounded it out with a three-pound mallet.

Visual inspection of the spinners showed a small area of galling, about 1/16 inch wide and maybe an inch long, on the mating surface of the spinners. This led to a little research, with somewhat confused results. As a result, I have two questions to pose to this distinguished assemblage. First, why did the spinner apparently weld itself to the wheel when it seemed to be properly lubricated? Second, and more important, will switching from aluminum spinners to stainless steel spinners eliminate the galling and/or welding problem? I’d hate to have a flat somewhere in the middle of East Camel’s Breath, Arizona and find the spinners frozen again.

By the way, I have to offer kudos to Enzo and his spinner tool. Without that tool, I think the only option would have been to cut the spinners off the hub. I’m now looking for a hardened steel bar for the next usage.