Letter From the Editor: Wheel Nuts
October 1, 2005
Call it balance, harmony, or the alignment of celestial bodies (not to
mention distribution of stress loads), but it is this quarterback’s opinion that
the most successful designs acknowledge the relationship between spokes and
nuts, and must relate one-to-one or in multiples thereof. A five-lug design must
have five or 10 spokes (15 are too many to clean), whereas a four-bolt pattern
must have two, four, eight, or 12 extensions. Solid disc wheels in steel or
alloy are exempt from the quarterback’s rules and may have any number of
functional or decorative circumferential perforations. Ditto wheels with caps
that cover the hub and its surrounding nuts. But six-, seven-, nine-, and
11-spoke designs fail the test without a corresponding number of nuts, and I
submit that truly iconic designs support these observations. Extra points go to
natural or paint finishes. On modern wheels, chrome must be used judiciously,
lest the vehicle mimic a mouth full of silver teeth.
These revelations were hammered home this summer at the Art Center Car Classic ’05, an event that has risen to prominence over the past five years as one of the most interesting, diverse, and prestigious concours in the country (www.artcenter.edu/carclassic). This year’s show, Legends: Timeless Automotive Design, featured more than 100 exceptional automobiles by invitation of Art Center College’s Transportation Design Department chair Stewart Reed and his selection committee. For the record, Art Center matriculates the majority of today’s world-class auto designers, and cars as diverse as the Gremlin and the Enzo have been penned by Art Center graduates. This year’s winning design was a 1947 Cisitalia owned by the Petersen Automotive Museum; a more beautiful piece of automotive sculpture is hard to imagine. And while its wheels were modest—as is the car—they broke none of the rules. Come to think of it, none of the other cars did, either.
Robert Ross
Editor/Creative Director
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