Yup.

My vote for installed is on the condition of them being bullet-nosed ARP studs.

Not good enough for me. Sorry. The ART hubs I used to use had non-ARP "high quality" black oxide studs in them and I saw more than one fail on enduro cars in 2012. Every single one of the ART studs got pulled and swapped for ARP hardware, and those failures vanished. If they aren't ARP, I'll swap them for ARP myself.

So keep the OEM hubs? Better yet, clean out all the grease and use ceramic bearings to reduce drag/cope with the short-term heat buildup. I doubt your drag car (which I think is cool, BTW) will ever put enough abuse into the front hubs to need anything but OEM parts.

I was kind of hoping to have cake and eat it too. Slippery fast hubs that last, at least with your average sized tire with average power. Have the ceramic hubs proven to be reliable? I will be turning left and right soon enough I hope.


Your right though, drag cars do not need super beefy hubs, brakes, or control arms.


As far as the conversation and vote on the studs, not having ARP studs on a high performance hub seems ridiculous to me. If the studs will in fact be ARP, then please have them installed. If not, I would prefer no studs at all.

In theory doing G5 ceramic BBs will make the hubs last significantly longer than the (I'm guessing) G100 chrome steel ones stock. Best I can tell just doing G5 in chrome steel will increase the average bearing life by at least 5x if not 10x, assuming the failure mode stays constant.

Too bad there's absolutely no empirical evidence of this being even a little bit true. G10/G5 balls provide a small life increase, but it is nothing near 5x or 10x or whatever other number you decide to pull out of your ass next.

Does the failure mode change when going to higher grade balls? The hubs I've seen that are failed out have a couple abused balls and the rest are fine or damaged from the bits of the destroyed balls. This is indicative that they're failing due to too large of a variance in ball size. HOWEVER they could be failing from incorrect preload, I always assumed it was ball size variance since thats most likely. If it is incorrect preload/clearence then we need to determine which way we need to go with either a shim if its too tight (unlikely) and the bearing heat is causing the grease to fail, or too loose and we're skidding the bearings or vibrating them when a corner is heavily loaded. Increasing the preload will also make the bearing assembly stiffer, which is nice.

We should get 5 lug, 6 lug, 8 lug conversions going on.

I want 3 lug all them lugs and lug nuts are heavy.

Separate Studs
 

It sounds like (so far) separate studs are the way to go, so if anyone wanted to install stock studs or ARP, they have that option.

I'll still drop in a set of 70mm 12.9 bullet-nose studs in gold chromate, just in case.

edit--I've been thinking about this hub issue for a while now. The Catfish at the 2012 SEMA show wore 5 x 114.3 RPF1's on custom hubs.

Two words for you... SMART CAR.

Single lug, like a bawz.

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I can see some being interested in a 5 lug to run different wheels.

I would love to see an improved hub. I am surprised it has not happened sooner. A tapered bearing sounds ideal on paper. I thought there were packaging issues with this design though?

With the current setup I have to believe used hubs with good grease are your best bet. Over time those ball bearings have rounded themselves good and worn a nice mating surface into the race. On top of that I bet the quality of the hub metallurgy (Japan mid 90's) is better than current China offerings.

We'll see about the tapered bearings...testing to follow. As usual, I have a nasty habit of letting the cat out of the bag before the product's done.

And yes, China steel = crap. I used to make the ReadyRamp (Ready Ramp Bed Extender) in China but just got disgusted with the outcome. We were even importing all of our material INTO China in order to get the quality we needed, and it just wasn't worth it.