Well I healed up enough to get back to disassembling my bogie wheels. When I last worked on them I had beat the tarnation out them trying to drive a wedge in to separate the wheels from the hubs and while I got a few of them apart, mostly I just got my butt handed to me. It was gonna be a slow death. I thought pressing them apart would have to be a lot easier. I’m too old and broken down to handle them much so I thought of a way to press them apart with them just sitting on the ground. I found a piece of ½” thick by 1-½” wide scrap steel bar and cut it about 3/4” shorter than the inside diameter of the wheel. I ground one end to the contour of the inside of the wheel. I drilled and tapped a ⅜-24 hole through this end, located the same distance from the end of the bar as the wheel studs are from the inside of the wheel. I threaded a ⅜-24 bolt through this hole. In the other end, I drilled a hole lengthwise and threaded it so I could put a ⅜-24 hex-head cap screw into it. I rounded the head of this bolt slightly so it would locate itself easier against the round inside surface of the wheel. I also jammed a nut against the head of it to make it easier to reach with an open-end wrench once inside the wheel. For a drift, I cut a piece of 1” aluminum round stock about 2-1/4” long and then drilled a 3/8” hole .250” deep into one end and a 1/2” hole .250” deep in the other. A hole this shallow leaves about 1/4"-3/8" gap under the drift so the wheel can lift up. To make the press work, I set the 1/2” hole of the aluminum drift over one of the wheel studs. I then screwed the cap screw into the bar far enough to where I could set the bar into the wheel below the lip, with the ⅜” bolt over the drift. I unscrewed the cap screw against the opposite side of the wheel, locking the other end of the bar tightly under the lip of the wheel and over the stud to be pressed against. Now all I had to do was tighten the ⅜” bolt into the drift, pushing on the stud and separating the wheel from the hub. I used anti-seize on the ⅜” bolt to help keep it from galling. After the wheel was lifted at the first stud, I flipped the drift and the tool to the stud on the opposite side, repeating the process and causing the hub to drop free. It probably took longer to describe this than it did to make the tool, and with it, using either an impact wrench or a hand wrench, each wheel only took a few minutes to disassemble. A heck of a lot easier than beating on them too!
Jon
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