Safety Wire Question

[Gaz64]

Originally Posted by eschaider

Wherever your wire changes directions by going through the little hole in the spinner or around the spoke of the wheel it will not have a smooth radius on the inside of the turn. When it gets that sharp bend it will break with far less tension than the cross sectional area of the wire would lead you to believe it would. I believe the metallurgy guys call it a notch fracture. It's sort of like scribing a line on glass — we know where it will fracture.

The safety wire is not intended to keep the spinner tight as someone who sees it for the first time might think. It is simply the canary in your spinner coal mine. If you install it to show a slack if the nut turns or as in Bob's case, slack with a visible bend to see if the wire tightened when the nut loosened it probably doesn't much matter.

What does matter is it is something you want to make a habit of regularly checking before driving so you don't have an unhappy surprise. The commentary from some of us who have experienced the loosening spinner is very real. The safety wire will not keep the spinner from loosening but it will warn you if it starts to.

BTW the only time spinners come off easily is when you don't want them to. When you want to remove them, a spinner removal tool will look like cheap money the moment you beat up a spinner wing from beating on it to loosen the spinner or worse break off.


Ed

This is the BEST piece of mechanical explanation I have read for sometime.

This is THE way to do safety wire for a spinner, since the size of componentry and the torque involved FAR outweighs what would be the equivalent function when adding safety wire to smaller parts.