Last year we arrived in Moab on the first Saturday and ran the Pickle the following Sunday. This year seems to be a repeat!? It was a toss up between a snowed in and muddy AreaBFE or a trail up North where it was dry. The Pickle seemed like a good choice, and we were right!
The week of all weeks is upon us. As thousands of enthusiasts prepare, load up and make the trek to beautiful and wondrous Moab we are also preparing to provide coverage and updates throughout the week for those of us who will not be making it to Moab this week.
This category of the Workbench will be our week-long site of coverage for EJS. Major updates will be posted on the forum as well, but be sure to keep checking back for more information and photos.
Moab or Bust!
This seems to come up often enough that I thought I’d document how I did mine. The pictures I have are all of my set of 16s, but it is the same process whether you are building 15s, 16s, 16.5s, or 17s. I used 16×7 steel wheels. The beadlocks add about an inch or so to the width of the wheel, so I ended up with 16×8 beadlock wheels.
The first thing you need to do is determine which side of your wheels you need to put the beadlock rings on. This may sound stupid, but let me explain. On the inside of the wheels is a “dished out” area that is used to allow the tire enough room to stretch over the bead when mounting. The dished out area is positioned to one side on the wheel. It is nearly always off-set to the outside facing surface of the wheel. However, on wheels with extremely little backspacing (2″ or less) the wheel may be reversed and the dished out area may be towards the inside surface of the wheel. The beadlock rings have to go on the side closest to the dished out area of the wheel. If you put them on the other side you will not be able to get a tire onto the wheel. This means that on some wheels the beadlock will be on the inside of the wheel, by the brakes. If this is not your desired result you may not have wheels that are suitable for making into beadlocks.
The next step is to take a grinder or wire wheel and clean all the paint, rust, and grime off the lip of the wheel that you will be welding to. This picture shows the area that needs to be cleaned, and it also shows the offset “dished out” area that I talked about earlier.
Once you’ve got the lip all cleaned up go grab one of your beadlock rings. Take a look at the edges of the ring. The edges on one side will be sharp and square. The edges on the other side will be slightly smoother and rounder. You want the smoother edges to be in contact with the tires, so lay the side with the sharp edges down on your wheel. Feel all the way around the ring and move it until it looks and feels like it is perfectly centered on the wheel. You also want to rotate the ring so that the valve stem of the wheel is in the middle of two bolt holes. You don’t want to have one of your beadlock bolts interfering with your valve stem. Here’s a picture of what you should have at this point.
Now that the ring is positioned where you want it, go ahead and tack-weld it into place in about four spots around the wheel.
Now find a comfortable spot to sit, and start welding. This weld needs to be pretty close to air-tight, so a quality weld is important. Most of the leaks come from where the welds start and stop, so two welds overlap. I try to make as few welding passes as possible. I can usually weld all the way around the perimeter of the wheel in four or five different sections. Some people say you should weld in many smaller sections to avoid heating up the wheel too much and warping it. That is good advice on many other projects, but I don’t think there is any way you are going to warp your wheel, so to minimize the possibility of leaks I weld in as few different sections as possible.
This next step is something that some people do, and some people don’t. After all the rings are welded up I like to grind down the welds a bit. This knocks off all the high spots and rough spots that make the tire harder to mount. Remember, when you go to mount your tires on these wheels the inside tire bead has to slide over this weld.
Next step is painting, and you already know how to do that… For the best results spray the bare metal with a primer before you spray your color. This will help the paint stick and last longer.
Assembling these things is a pain, with thirty-something bolts per wheel. So you don’t want to put them together, inflate the tires, and find out you have a leaky weld somewhere and have to take out all the bolts to seal your weld. Take a minute now and smear some RTV over the welds just to make sure they seal when you mount up the tires. When you mount the tires, a lot of that RTV will scrape off. That’s okay, any RTV that is plugging up a hole will stay in there and maintain the seal.
After the RTV dries, you are ready to mount your tires! Take your first tire and lay it on the ground with the side you want facing out laying down on the ground. Take your wheel and lay it beadlock side down in the tire.
Push one edge of the wheel into the tire and use a pry bar or two to work the tire bead over the edge of the wheel.
Once you’ve pried the whole tire bead over the edge of the wheel it will end up like this.
Now flip it over.
Center the wheel in the tire and place an outer ring on the outside of the tire. Be sure to place the outer ring on the tire round edges down!
Now you can start putting in bolts. I usually start with four bolts spaced evenly around the wheel and then fill in the spaces. They don’t have to be really tight. Just tighten them all evenly. You will probably have to go all the way around the wheel at least twice to get all the bolts tightened evenly. There will be around 3/8s of an inch of space between the two beadlock rings when you are done. There may be more or less space than this depending on how thick the bead of your tires are. You may notice a bit of “coning” on the outer rings. This can be minimized by placing a V-belt inside the bolts between the two beadlock rings. I did this on my 15″ DIY beadlocks, but did not bother on the 16s. They don’t seem to have much of the coning, and it doesn’t bother me anyway. I do not have the correct part numbers for the belts to use for the different sizes of DIY beadlocks, but hopefully someone will post those.
You’re ready to put air in this thing! You may have to push the back side of the wheel into the tire while the air chuck is on the valve stem to get it to seal enough to seat the inside bead. I use a clip-on air chuck so I can just flip the tire over and step on the wheel to get it to seal.
That’s it! It’s a beadlock! You can now air down as low as you want without fear of your tires coming off the wheel.
Summit Machine – A company known for it’s pride, craftsmenship and perfection with their in-house machined parts.
Last year Summit Machine gave me the chance to run their brand new Dana 44 drive gears. I know what you’re thinking… Dana 44? Foolishly, over the years I have spent more on my front axle than it would cost to buy and build a proper D60. But we will leave my stubbornness behind for this article. 
Prior to the switch, I needed something to solve my exploding hub fiasco. I was going through Warn premium hubs every other trail outing. Binding my tires between rocks, making full throttle climbs, and basically just pushing the complete limits of my front axle had caused too much carnage. The people at the parts store start looking at you funny when you come in that often for warranty exchanges. It got tiring and I decided I needed a solution. That’s when Mike at Summit Machine told me that they were coming out with new Dana 44 drive gears.
They already have an excellent reputation for Dana 60 drive gears so I was interested to see what they could provide in a smaller package. Holding the d44 gears in one hand and the 60 gears in the other is pretty laughable. The difference is quite amusing. That said, these little Dana 44 slugs were looking really promising.
Summit Machine has thought of it all when it comes to these drive gears. They are made out of chromoly 8620 heat treated steel. “What’s that?” you say; That is balls out strength and they are made right here in the good old USA. No Chinese steal in these drive gears.
The gears come with all the hardware you need, a 6061 aluminum to protect the hub internals, and a really neat extra retaining ring that allows you to run the caps without the gear (for protection). This is particularly handy in case you break a shaft or just don’t need 4wd for a long period of time. The retaining ring also properly spaces the gear on the axle shaft for the best spline contact.
Installing the gears couldn’t have been easier. The snap rings are really nice full circle rings that are much more manageable for field repair & removal. You push the gear in, add the axle shaft snap ring, add the spacing / retaining ring, put the cap on and throw the bolts in. There are even seals around the cap and bolts to keep the water & dust out. If you really needed to pull the gears and run and empty hub, you would not be out of very much time.
How do they perform? So far so good! I can’t break them after a year of hard 4 wheeling and I’m willing to bet that you cannot either. I am positive that these gears will outlast the axle and then some. I have thrown everything at them. The previous destroyers of my Warn premium hubs have the Summit Machine drive gears laughing. Ledge climbs, sharp twisty crawling, Coyote Canyon axle twisting boulders, you name it they’ve taken it. Without any maintenance, they are ready for another year of 4 wheeling. Updates will follow.
Check out SummitMachine.com for more information.
The crew at Ben Hanks Racing attended this year’s King Of The Hammers in Johnson Valley and came back with some photos and video to report. They’ve provided us with so much material it’s going to take a while for us to get it posted so keep checking back. The word we get is that it was a great event that we hope will continue to evolve and get better every year. KOH is the number one hybrid of baja racing and rock crawling, no doubt about it. This is the kind of mixture that fuels new ideas, designs and challenges the very fundamentals of off-road development. Competitors were pushed to find their limits mentally and mechanically. I doubt none of them came out unscathed.
We are working on getting the video parsed and uploaded so hang tight. In the meantime get your fix of KOH pictures from our RME Gallery
Photo Highlights:
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