Power Shift

Electric vehicles will transform the heavy-duty aftermarket … eventually

BY JOHN G. SMITH

Those who sell parts and repair trucks might feel uneasy when reports emerge about a coming generation of electric trucks.

There are reportedly about 33% fewer parts to consider when internal combustion engines and transmissions are replaced by motors and gearboxes. Features such as regenerative braking are expected to dramatically reduce brake wear. As for many of the fluids needed to keep components moving? They can remain in their tanks and drums.

Think of them as disruptors. But presenters during the annual Heavy Duty Aftermarket Dialogue stressed that the changes are not coming overnight. Chris Patterson, a consultant and former Daimler Trucks North America CEO, counts just 50 electrified heavy trucks in North America.

About 88% of today’s trucks run on diesel, with the remaining 12% mostly powered by gasoline, said John Blodgett, MacKay and Company’s vice-president of sales and marketing. The volume of natural gas equipment barely accounts for a single percentage point. Five years out, he expects 1% to be electric, 2% to be natural gas, 12% to be gasoline, and 84% to be diesel.

But a decade from now, forecasts suggest a split of 76% diesel, 11% gasoline, 7% electric, and 5% natural gas, with a fraction of a percent relying on hydrogen-electric power. Existing internal combustion engines will still be in service, and need to be serviced, but

Volvo is the latest OEM to showcase battery-electric commercial vehicles. But how long until equipment like this has an effect on the aftermarket? (Photo: Volvo Trucks North America)

aftermarket suppliers are now preparing for their roles in the changing mix. “This is real, for sure,” said Delphi Technologies CEO Rick Dauch.

He isn't the only one to share that belief. A day after he participated in the panel, BorgWarner announced that it was acquiring Delphi to leverage the manufacturer’s power electronics products, capabilities and scale.

Aftermarket support is needed “As programs are launched five to six years from now, what are the parts coming back?” Dauch asked the crowd. “Braking and steering; the fuel injection business will go down, but not for 20- 25 years.” The electric vehicles will also require a gearbox and motor.

“You still have a business model,” he assured the crowd of aftermarket professionals.

Shifting emissions standards are largely responsible for the transformation that is occurring. In Europe, Volkswagen’s diesel emissions scandal and future emissions rules of Euro 7 will essentially sideline diesel-powered cars. Delphi’s light-duty diesel business has dropped 70% in just five years, leading to plant closures in Spain, France and England.

“We’ve got a billion-dollar business in electrification, last year down $200 million because of the downturn in lightduty diesel controllers,” Dauch said. “We think we’re going to double our electrification business in five years.”

That has meant opening five new plants in Eastern European markets like Turkey, Romania and Poland alone. Deciding when the market will emerge is no small task, however.

‘All in’ on electric vehicles Dana has also gone “all in” on electrification, said chairman and CEO Jim Kamsickas, referring to Dana’s work on e-drives with Kenworth and Peterbilt. Its gasket business is focusing on the needs of battery cooling systems and enclosures. But he also puts the demand for new electric vehicle systems in perspective. “The mechanical piece is still going to be there.”

The demand for the new components and systems, however, has both companies challenged to find enough capable software engineers.

Delphi has 1,600 of them now, and it needs more.

“Just being a motor supplier, just being an inverter supplier, just being a gearbox supplier itself, yes you’ll get value out of that. But in the longhaul you’re going to need to have engineers,” Kamsickas said of the work to develop systems. T T

WHEEL WELL 4 considerations to keep wheels secure and safe

BY JIM PARK

Keeping your wheels where they belong should simply be a matter of process. Here are four reminders of what needs to be done when servicing truck tires and wheels to ensure they do not separate from the truck.

1. Bearing installation and adjustment Wheel bearings account for a smaller percentage of the overall number of wheel separations, but they are a factor. Wheel-end failures result from overor under-tightened bearings or lack of lubrication. Under-tightening (excessive endplay) can cause the wheel to wobble on the spindle, damaging the seal, which can lead to a loss of lubricant and eventual failure of the bearings. Over-tightening (excessive preload) can damage the bearing – causing overheating, seal failure, and lubricant loss.

Bearing manufacturer SKF strongly recommends establishing accurate and repeatable wheel bearing installation/ adjustment procedures to ensure consistency, as does Recommend Practice 618B from the American Trucking Associations’ Technology and Maintenance Council (TMC). It describes a nine-step installation and adjustment process, depending on the type of wheel end assembly, ending with the use of a dial indicator to verify correct adjustment. But industry sources say that final step is often left out, despite being one of the most critical parts of the process.

“That’s a recommendation for an ideal

SPRING 2020 situation,” admits SKF key account manager John Heffernan. “Getting techs to use torque wenches was a huge step for the industry. Use of dial indicators is growing, and more fleets are adopting the practice, but we still have a long way to go.”

Additionally, Heffernan says techs occasionally incorrectly install pre-set or LMS-type hub systems, torquing the nut down and then backing it off, as they would when installing conventional single- or double-nut systems. “That can damage the spacer and the bearings,” he says. “Fleets should work with the techs to ensure they understand how to install the various types of wheel-end systems they use.”

Bearing failure leading to a separation takes time – first, for the lubricant to leak out, which leaves very visible oil residue on the inside tires. Then the bearing has to heat up enough to self-destruct. Drivers should be made aware of the symptoms of a pending bearing failure, such as oil on the tires, excessively hot wheel hubs, smoke, or a burning odor from the wheels or grinding noises. They should also be alert for an ABS lights coming on unexpectedly, which according to Jeremy Gough, director of national fleet

Proper fastener torque is critical in wheel installation. Use only a calibrated torque wrench or pneumatic tool designed for the purpose. Impact wrenches should never be used to set the final fastener torque.

maintenance at Bison Transport, could be caused by a loss of contact between the sensor and the excitor ring, resulting from a wheel that’s flopping around on the axle spindle.

Gough takes steps to ensure bearing and wheel installation is done right in the first place. For example, having a second technician check the work before the truck or trailer is released from the shop. He also puts every technician involved in wheel-end work through a training program at least once a year. Drivers get similar training, but specific to what they can do to prevent wheels from coming off, he says.

“We take the threat of wheel separation seriously,” he says. “We use the pointer-type wheel-nut indicators that will show us if a nut is loosening off. And we check all the wheel fasteners on every truck that comes into the shop, even if it’s for a lighting issue. We check the nuts first, then fix the lights.”

2. Wheel and hub preparation Before you even think about putting the wheel back on the truck, there’s a little prep work to do. The contact surfaces between the hub and the inner and outer wheels must be absolutely free of dirt, rust, grease and other contaminants. “A buildup of foreign material on the wheel-end mounting surfaces causes extra thickness in the joint,” says Brandon Uzarek, Accuride’s field engineer for wheels. “The foreign material may settle or work its way out of the joint, causing the tension in the bolt to decrease, resulting in a loss of clamping force.” Extra care is needed with painted steel wheels. For one thing, rust can develop under the paint if the finish is broken, causing flaking. This material can drop out over time, reducing the clamping force. The coating thickness on a painted wheel is important, too, as coatings thicker than 3-3.5 mm can affect the mounting surfaces between the bolt holes.

WHEEL-OFF NUMBERS CONTINUE TO RISE

The causes of wheel separations are well known. They include bearing failures, broken or missing wheel fasteners, damaged wheels and – to a lesser degree – failures of certain axle and suspension components. What’s not fully understood is why these events continue to occur.

In Ontario – the poster child for wheel separations – 2,327 wheel separations were reported between 1997 and 2019, according to that province’s ministry of transportation (MTO). Eleven people lost their lives to separated truck wheels in the province during that period. Those figures do not include the other provinces and territories in Canada, nor do they include unreported cases.

During the mid-1990s, Ontario investigations into a spate of fatalities involving separated truck wheels led officials to conclude there was a problem with the way trucks wheels were being handled, maintained, and installed by wheel service technicians. In response, the province established the Commercial Vehicle Wheel Service (CVWS) training program in 1996. It required anyone servicing truck tires and wheels to take a tire and wheel service technician training and certification course, which included a set of standard procedures for installing and servicing related components.

The following year, the number of reported wheel separation events hit its highest level ever, at 215. We saw a downward trend in separation events between 1998 (99) and 2010 (47), but they began creeping upward again in 2011 (56), spiking to 147 in 2013. The number has remained north of 125 through 2019 (127).

There’s clearly some correlation between the number of separations and the number of trucks on the road and kilometers driven, but research and incident investigations suggest there’s a strong connection between lax maintenance practices and the potential for an incident.

Despite the training and certification program, the abundance of training material and step-by-step instructions provided by wheel component suppliers, industry associations and others, the numbers continue to rise. Clearly, we’re still overlooking something. T T

The contact areas must be rigorously cleaned with a wire brush to remove all foreign material before mounting the wheel. Wheel studs should also be cleaned with a wire brush to rid the thread grooves of rust and foreign material that can affect torque on the nut.

3. Proper fastener torque “A brand-new Grade 8 M22-1.5 wheel bolt and nut can provide approximately 50,000 lb. of clamping force when 500 lb-ft of torque is applied. When applied to the entire 10-bolt wheel end on a hub-piloted wheel, that equates to 500,000 lb. of clamping force,” says Uzarek. Those figures apply to new wheel nuts, usually mounted on new hubs using new studs.

There’s little published research on the impact of hardware aging and degradation caused by use and environmental factors, but the Heavy Vehicle Wheel Separations: Exploring The Causes study, by Ottawa-based Woodrooffeand Associates, suggests that re-using degraded flange nuts could be problematic.

“Anecdotal tests have shown that as [two-piece] flange nuts age, or when they are re-used, their torque/clamping force characteristics can be as little as 50% of the design value,” the report notes. “Given that hub-piloted wheels

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Fastener retainers can prevent nuts from backing completely off, but they won't indicate a possible loss in clamping force caused when excess material wears down, and the space between the wheel and mounting face comes loose. Periodic torque checks are still required.

“We don’t cut

corners on wheel maintenance and service. It’s not cheap, but the money is better spent being proactive than reactive.”

– Jeremy Gough

Bearing failures are less common than fastener-related separations, 26% compared to 65%, say several investigative reports on wheel separations.

depend exclusively on clamping force to prevent the wheel from separating from the hub, it is clear that such a reduction in torque/clamp force characteristics represents a significant risk.” Tighter is not better, especially when re-using studs and nuts. Many technicians attempt to achieve maximum clamping force by applying more than 500 lb-ft of torque without realizing the possible consequences.

“If a wheel stud is subjected to excessive torque, it is possible to stretch the

stud past its yield point,” cautions Uzarek. “If this occurs, the joint will act as if it is under-torqued, and there will be low clamping force.”

The best way to avoid this condition is to snug the nuts and then bring them up to their final torque with a calibrated torquing device.

“Impact guns are not recommended,” Uzarek stresses.

Bison uses a calibrated pneumatic torque wrench from McCann, which Gough says costs about $8,000. “We don’t cut corners on wheel maintenance and service,” he says. “It’s not cheap, but the money is better spent being proactive than reactive.”

4. Wheel fastener retorque With all that said, there remains one step in this process that fleets rarely, if ever, comply with – the wheel-fastener retorque. The manufacturers of heavy truck wheels recommend that wheels be checked for correct torque between 80 and 160 km after wheel installation. Doing that is extremely difficult in a logistics sense for most fleets, but there are alternatives

Some suggest running the truck around the yard with a loaded trailer, doing a series of tight right and left turns and hard brakes to give the wheels an opportunity to settle onto the studs and against the mounting face of the hub, and then retorquing them. Others recommend flagging the unit for a retorque the next time it arrives in the yard.

Neither situation is ideal, but both are better than ignoring the requirement to retorque the wheels after installation. T T

WHETHER YOU’RE MOVING GIZMOS, GADGETS OR THE BOTTOM LINE, WE’LL GET YOU THERE.

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