Jim Franklin wrote:
>
> I hope this isn't too far from the list charter...there seems to be
> a widely varied collective of experience here though.
>
> I bought a '90 E250 van for racing (motorcycles, not racing the van!).
> The front brake rotors were shot so I bought new ones. On the new ones,
> there is a 1/6" high protrusion in the center, about an inch smaller than the
> diameter of the lug nut circle, that the rim is supposed to
> slip over and rest on. Problem is, the I.D. of the rim is about 1/16"
> smaller than the O.D. of this pilot protrusion. On the old rotors
> there was about 1/8" gap so the rim didn't even use this as a load
> bearing surface, it seemed to add a trivial amount of support for
> the hub and outer wheel bearing, or maybe it's just the changeover
> from machined surface, where the rim sits flush, to unmachined cast
> surface.
>
> I called Federal-Mogul/Wagner, and they said this is the right one and
> have had no fitment complaints. The previous owner of the van said
> he never swapped rims, and they are Ford steel rims. The parts counter
> guy suggested I grind off the offending metal on the rims but I can't
> say I'm real comfortable with that. No dealer stocks the rotors so I
> can't compare them, and at $163 each it's 3x the cost than from the local
> auto parts place, so "just buying them there" isn't really an option. Yet.
In the heavy-truck industry, this is the difference between
"hub-piloted" and "stud-piloted" wheels. I wouldn't have a clue about
wheel-mounting on a later Ford van, but, if your wheels have a
depression in them to receive a similarly cone-shaped protrusion on the
lug nut, the piloting is being done by the stud and lug nut, in which
case, it would be okay to remove the ridge.
What is very likely is that someone decided to supercede the earlier
rotor (what your van used) to a later style, believing they were
interchangeable. That's why Federal-Mogul says, "they're fine," where,
in fact, you _know_ they're not.
You can take these to a machine-shop for either removal of the ridge or
cutting it down to clear the ID of the rim, so long as the lug nuts work
as described above.
Cheers.
--
Michael D. Porter
Roswell, NM (yes, _that_ Roswell)
[mailto:mporter@zianet.com]
The gulf between content and substance continues to widen....
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