so the day before i left for japan i broke an axle coming off the freeway, or at least i thought i did. i hobbled back to my mom’s place and figured i’d deal with it when i got back. it was in the back of my mind the entire trip, and i was dreading having to replace the axle (having broken it before racing a 350z (although i was driving the z and costin was in the integra =p)). anyway, i got back in town today and even though eric offered to loan me the xb, i figured i’d just get crackin’. i put the car on stands and as i’m getting ready to pull off the wheel i notice the lugnuts are lose. so i figure that maybe the axle wasn’t broken, and i was just lazy the last time i put it on. well that turned out to be true and false.

the axle wasn’t broken, which was good news. it was the fact that the wheel didn’t fit right (i just got new wheels in the front last week). apparently the rim didn’t fit completely over the hub and i hadn’t noticed it when i put them on. so the wheel was connected only by the surface area of outer hub, which is less than a centimeter thick, instead of the entire hub which is about the size of a cd. that little surface area was bound to break the lugnuts lose, and the damn wheel was “walking” all around the outer hub. it turns out that the scion hubs (my new steel wheels were from a scion), while having the same 4×100 bolt pattern, have a 2mm smaller diameter in the outer hub. 2mm doesn’t sound like a big deal, but that’s 1mm of 15mm thick steel around the entire circumference of the outer hub-hole. i busted out the pneumatic die-grinder and got cuttin’. it took about about 1.5hrs per wheel, but i cleanly milled out the new hole that fits over the honda outer hub.

here’s the wheel with a 2mm smaller-than-i-need-it-to-be diameter:

die-grinding… there were tons of sparks but i couldn’t capture them:

here’s the finished hole. afterwards i masked and painted the hole gloss black to match the wheel and prevent rust:

neighbor john told me a funny analogous story (it would be a perfect analogy if i had an american car) about world war II… apparently every almost every country used a .45 caliber bullet, so if they captured a munitions cache, they could use the bullets in their guns. the japanese, knowing this, designed and used only a .46 caliber bullet, so they could use the .45 bullets they captured, but no one could use theirs. crafty bastards!