Wheel nuts should be expensive!

[safeaschuck]

They are the safety feature which hopefully prevents the use of all other safety features! They are as important as crash structures, HANS, even helmets.
They have to be removed in a huge hurry with high impact forces and have to go back on pretty quick with no slip-ups. It's absolutely right that they should be made from the best materials available and very tightly toleranced.

There has been plenty of slagging off of the price of the humble wheelnut on here lately, from many quarters, probably because they are seen as humble, in no way as exotic as a piston or even a brake calliper. Maybe they should be the first candidate for a one-make tendering process, but lets not look to save money here for the sake of it.

I handled one a while back, I think they are/were forged Titanium, a beautiful piece of kit and the price estimates I have seen on here and heard elsewhere range from £500/£2000 per piece, does anyone have any more info?

[xpensive]

Couldn't agree more safechuck. But don't forget that they should be carefully collected after each race in order to be destroyed due to possible wear and fatigue, which could hamper both functionality as well as safety.
If techically feasible recycled, can you do that with forged Titanium?

[safeaschuck]

I'm sure you could recycle them into something other than wheelnuts, something cosmetic like mobile phone casings? As far as I'm aware (from aluminium anyway) when forging, a uniform grain structure of the raw material bar is important to achieve a good forged part. i.e. the dotted lines which are often used to represent grain structure would run the lengthwise down the bar in a cylindrical fashion, and when compressed into a nut shape with a hole through would look like a top hat in cross section.
The temperature of the material is kept low enough so that the material does not become...whats the word, I can't remember and I'm not going to rely on good old wikipedia this time and make this post an entry form there, but basically it doesn't get close to a liquid state, is it plastic? errrr. Basically the bonds which hold the grain in line are not broken but they are hot enough to accept some bending.
Forging Aluminium is a very expensive process on a small scale, the weight required to forge something like a piston is what? 90 tonnes (again my memory fails me) . To look at, a couple of hydraulic rams the size of your leg. And titanium is going to require a lot, lot more pressure than that.

Anyhow they recycled nuts could possibly be fed back in at foundry level but I'm sure the foundry would be concentrating on fresh raw material for it's F1 customers.
I'm sure Nokia would take it though.

[xpensive]

With you great inspiration, I will too try to continue "a capella", wthout Wikipedia that is.
I belive with such a delicate component as an F1 wheel-nut, the proper way to go would be powder-metallurgy, CIP or HIP (Cold/Hot Isostatic Pressure, in order to achieve an isotropic state of properties in the material.
Method is rather simple, when you build a thin-walled flask of mild-steel, fill it with titanium-powder or the proper alloy, remove the air through a low-vacuum and place it in a 1000 C at 100 MPa autoclave for curing.
All you have to do after that is erode the flask with acid, voila!

[safeaschuck]

Well I never! I noticed the nut in question had a matte, almost shot-blasted finish on the external faces, I assumed this had come from clean up the marks after forging, this was backed up by the guy who's nut it was saying 'it's forged', now I know the full story.
I assume that the flask would give a good enough tolerance for the outer dimensions to be finish sizes? And that the surface finish is a product of the manufacturing method?
Must be a bugger to thread cut...unless the powder was fine enough and the material flow good enough to form a thread?
Voila indeed, thats a very expensive process also!
Many thanks for the enlightenment.

[xpensive]

Well, not exactly done yet, when said flask has a nasty habit of deforming due to heat and pressure, we do need certain amount of machining in order to meet the high demands in terms of accuracy for an F1 wheel-nut. ISO P5 perhaps, where I would suggest CNC-contolled Wire Cut EDM for the best results. Finish the piece with Copper-Silver plating of the threads and Glass Shot-peening of the outer-surface and you are basically home.

By they way, before the machining procedure, material-QA should include liquid-penetrant, utrasonic as well as radiographics to ensure a homogenous material.

Or, you can find a standard steel-nut on the web for 20 bucks, but that would surely cost you 200 g or more of extra unsprung weight.

[safeaschuck]

mmm... would we chance a 20 buck nut at 200mph?
I didn't know about the level of QA but I'm not surprised, If it's safety related these things really do need to get that level of testing to ensure they're not going to fail.
Makes you wonder if the previously mooted suggestion (I think if was Max or Bernie again) of phasing out some of the more exotic materials would save as much money as some people think. Say they did use a steel nut, it would be vac remelt? then forged? there would be plenty of machining ops, at least 2 heat treatment ops, harden and stress relieve which is unnecessary with the Ti (If I'm not mistaken) and some expensive hard machining to do plus an anti corrosive coating and it would still require many of the same/similar QA procedures.
Plus it would be a whacking great thing in comparison, surely the thread depth would need to be increased significantly to cope with the lower strength of the material, a nice big shiny wheel nut, very F1. HA
They were on about doing this sort of thing to wishbones and other components also, ugh!

So that copper silver coating is for anti gauling/binding? a much cleaner version of good old copperslip?

[xpensive]

Thread-galling is naasty, imagine that when you had Nigel coming in for fresh tyres, you be in a world of ---!
The old molydisulfide, copper-paste or whatever is still ok for Joe's garage, but you can typically see Copper+Silver-plating on 316-stainless threads (female-side only) for modern hydraulic fittings, such as Swagelok.

[DaveKillens]

I appreciate high tech as much as anyone. I love to read about it, learn about it, even work with it. There's really nothing like a well designed, well manufactured high tech component.
But I really have to ask the difficult question.. is it necessary? In the purest racing terms, yes, any effort to reduce that critical unsprung weight. But in today's financial climate and expectations.. I have misgivings.
Now I deserve severe critism for introducing a concept practiced by NA$CAR, but how about their system, the plain old, "been with us forever", four or five studs and their associated nuts. Yes, it definitely adds mass. Yes, it is definitely a step backwards in the technological progress of F1.
But it's as safe, and most definitely a heck of a lot cheaper.

[safeaschuck]

Dammit I had to resort to wikipedia, 12 seconds for NASCAR style tyre only pit stop is a game changer, in more ways than just money. I'll be glad to see the back of fuel stops because they are slow, dangerous and seem to unduly affect the outcome of the race but the F1 tyre only stops are cool because they are so damn fast, a crowd pleaser I reckon! I'd say moving to multi-nut hubs would negate dropping re-fuelling. Then again you still have pit lane speed limits!? I'd love to see full speed pit lane entries again, that was defiantly cool.
Other than that I've no objections to 4-5 studs on principle. It does the job.
I'm sure with a bit of thought you could make some sort of self centralising gear driven 4 way impact wrench tooling to undo all four nuts at once which would overcome most of the time deficit, but it would push the price back up.

[ISLAMATRON]

I'm sure IRL wheel nuts dont cost nearly as mush as F1 ones do, probly 1/10th the price and they do the same job... actually IRL has a much higher top speed

[DaveKillens]

hey, I'd rather witness a quick pit stop as we have seen. To watch each wheel require 5 nuts removed is not what I want.
But the present requirement for high quality wheel nuts may become one of Max's focus on cost reduction, and sadly, we may see something like the NA$CAR system.

[safeaschuck]

The oracle has spoken, wheelnuts cost £850, The Times interview Mosley:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/ ... 928101.ece

He was confident that the limit of £30 million, which is likely to lead to huge job losses, was realistic. “It has been carefully costed,” he said. “The cars will be much less refined in detail, because teams will not be able to spend huge sums on minute advantages — for example, $1,200 (about £850) on a wheel nut which is only used once — but from the grandstand or on television they won’t look or sound any less ‘Formula One’ than the current, ultra-expensive cars.”

If this is Max trying to make a point I suspect the average price of an averagely complex wheelnut may be lower but I'm willing to accept thats a lot of money.
It would be brought down considerable of course if they were a standard (as IRL?), but still high spec (F1) item, which I'm all for.

[alelanza]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-t6G7Z9 ... r_embedded[/youtube]

I reckon F1 cars aren't tall enough for this particular event to take place, but nevertheless you can still extrapolate it. That wheelnut(s) goes a long way

[ISLAMATRON]

even worse, in an open car that wheel could have hit the driver