Monster Truck Madness – Hold On To Your Nuts

When talking about monster truck upgrades, it can be hard to wrap your head around the sheer variety of options to spice up and bullet proof your ride. Aluminum axle housings. Brushless systems. Fancy tires with closed cell foams. However, arguably the most important and cheapest tech tip that I can give you- check your nuts!

Obvious pun oppotunities aside, wheel nuts are a very important and often over-looked thing on many solid axle trucks. These kinds of rigs are absolutely notorious for quickly spinning out even tightly-cinched units.

This is even more of a problem now that scale planetary wheel covers are popular. They add just a tad bit more of a hassle to checking your wheels before every run, making it easier to miss when they loosen.

While the obvious result of running a monster with nuts that rapidly come lose is a lost tire or two (like my friend Colby and his Orange Dodge Express, pictured at the top….p.s. sorry Colb!), there can be other damaging results. This is the number 1 reason for spun hexes. When the wheel starts moving around, it also creates situations where you can easily snap knuckles and rear lock-outs.

The solution to this problem is to make sure that you have a quality set of serrated lock nuts. They make them in any size, but on my SMT10’s I like to use a set of M4 Axial AXA1046. They work great!

Serrated nuts work by grabbing onto the wheel as you tighten them, creating little impressions in the plastic or metal. However, even that doesn’t always work on a high-power monster truck. For total piece of mind, I use a tiny dab of blue thread locker. I want to emphasize both BLUE (do not use red!) and DAB. A little goes a long way.

I started doing this two years ago and I’ve never had a wheel come lose in that time. Whether you use thread lock or not though, make sure to at least use serrated nuts. Those big tires will do you no good if you lose one or two!