Easy Wheel Swap?
Thread Starter
Pro
Joined: May 2004
Posts: 531
Likes: 46
From: Tucson, AZ
Easy Wheel Swap?
Hey guys -
This is probably a pretty stupid question, but I'm going to go ahead and ask it anyways...On my old 1968 Firebird, I used to have two sets of rear wheels and tires - one set of normal ones and then one set for the drag strip...It used to take me a jack, a wrench, and around 20 minutes tops to swap out one set for the other....Now, I want to get the same setup with my vette, but I'm not quite sure if it's possible to swap wheels that quickly on our cars due to all the sensors back there and even the special key that comes with the car that's necessary to even get the wheels off...So I suppose I'm asking whether or not you can swap wheels/tires on a late model vette as easily as on the old cars, or if it takes either quite a bit of time or special tools?
This is probably a pretty stupid question, but I'm going to go ahead and ask it anyways...On my old 1968 Firebird, I used to have two sets of rear wheels and tires - one set of normal ones and then one set for the drag strip...It used to take me a jack, a wrench, and around 20 minutes tops to swap out one set for the other....Now, I want to get the same setup with my vette, but I'm not quite sure if it's possible to swap wheels that quickly on our cars due to all the sensors back there and even the special key that comes with the car that's necessary to even get the wheels off...So I suppose I'm asking whether or not you can swap wheels/tires on a late model vette as easily as on the old cars, or if it takes either quite a bit of time or special tools?
Race Director
Joined: Oct 2002
Posts: 16,477
Likes: 26
From: Gone
CI 6-7-8-9-10 Veteran
St. Jude Donor '03
Same procedure, and same time to swap as with any car.
The locking lugnuts can easily replaced with standard nuts if you'd like. They are only a very weak attempt at preventing theft of the wheels/tires.
There's no sensors to worry about when pulling the wheels from the car. The TPM sensors are inside the wheel (they are one piece with the valvestem).
If you put on other wheels/tires to go racing, note you might get a "service tire mon. system" error message, since the car is no longer getting tire pressure updates from the wheel sensors. Simply hit the reset button to clear this, and no, it won't affect the car's performance at all. Any TPM error messages you might get should disappear when you put your street wheels/tires back on.
The locking lugnuts can easily replaced with standard nuts if you'd like. They are only a very weak attempt at preventing theft of the wheels/tires.
There's no sensors to worry about when pulling the wheels from the car. The TPM sensors are inside the wheel (they are one piece with the valvestem).
If you put on other wheels/tires to go racing, note you might get a "service tire mon. system" error message, since the car is no longer getting tire pressure updates from the wheel sensors. Simply hit the reset button to clear this, and no, it won't affect the car's performance at all. Any TPM error messages you might get should disappear when you put your street wheels/tires back on.
