Project Cappuccino: Nuts & Bolts Are Wheely Cool

While doing some routine maintenance on our Suzuki Cappuccino, we noticed that the wheel nuts were not always spinning on and off smoothly.  Some nuts would stick slightly as we ran them down with the impact gun.  Others would spin down, but then never seemed to fully tighten: even when we used a torque wrench they never felt fully tight.  Both of these symptoms indicate that our wheel hardware is worn out.  If we didn’t address this, we risk stripped threads or sheared studs.  Both of these could result in a wheel loss when driving, an extreme safety risk!   

Suzuki and GM used this stud on a bunch of different cars, so replacing our 30 year old studs and nuts with OEM parts would have been super easy.  But that’s boring and nobody here wants to read about that.  So we decided to do it the hard way and find better studs.

Replacing the studs is not hard but it is labor intensive. We did this same swap on our 240SX when we converted it to 5-lug hubs so we had all of the supplies needed to do this on the Cappuccino. The first thing we did was install a sacrificial 1.25 pitch nut a few turns onto the old stud.