Putting a Grant wheel on my '93

[Slartibartfast]

Rat Trap's steering wheel was starting to get gross. Hand sweat, sun damage, and the previous owner's lung darts had left the outer rim cracked, turning brown, and starting to smell. Then I remembered that aftermarket steering wheels are a thing. Maybe the minitruckers are onto something, I thought.

 

I figured I'd keep things simple by going with a wheel and a column adapter from the same company. Grant's website showed an adapter kit for these trucks, #3560, so that was a good start. I had a look through their catalog and decided on their #1160. Simple, black on black, leather grip. No rainbow chrome, no trucker babes, no flames.

 

http://www.grantproducts.com/images/product-images/lg/1160.jpg

 

Summit had it well below list price, so I ordered it from there. They didn't have the column adapter, and Grant's website's checkout didn't work, so I ordered that from elsewhere.

 

The folks I ordered the column adapter from emailed me the next day to say that they didn't actually have one. I checked around, and found a bunch of other retailers listing them as discontinued or out of stock. The few who claimed to have them either didn't get back to me or confirmed that they couldn't get them either. 

 

Grant's site also listed a fancy billet adapter, #5560, but I couldn't find one of those, either.

 

There are a bunch of cheap D21 column adapters on eBay. They're all drilled for six-bolt wheels. And the #1160 wheel I had ordered, which by this point was already in the mail, is five-bolt.

 

Nissan Nut's page suggested that Grant #3596 would fit instead. I found one on eBay. It came in an "American Products Company" box. (Made in Taiwan, naturally.) It doesn't say Grant on it anywhere, but it looks just like the Grant kits, the splines are correct, and the three-bolt pattern matches the spacer. Is it a knockoff? Is this Grant's own off-brand? It's what I could get.

 

The wheel came with a spacer. The spacer adapts between Grant's three-on-1.75" pattern (which the column adapter uses, as do some of their simpler wheels) to their five-on-2.75" pattern, which their "Signature Series" wheels (including this one) use. It's made from welded steel, and it feels sturdy. Unfortunately, it spaced the wheel too far back, to where I had to reach for the lights and wipers. It's also stuffed into a rubber sleeve, which doesn't fit it very well. Flipping it around doesn't help, either. Either it's so loose at the front that you can see the metal part of the spacer through the wheel, or it's so loose at the back that you can get your finger in between them. And it's tight enough in the middle that it gets stretched into a polygon by the spokes of the spacer. I suspect its primary function was to sell the billet adapter kits.

 

Naked spacer in the middle, misshapen rubber thing on the right.

 

 

On the left is the Forever Sharp MG15-B billet spacer that I used instead. It's half an inch shorter, which fixed the gap to the stalks, and it looks way better than the floppy rubber turtleneck. It actually looks quite nice! It also solved a dumb problem with the column adapter, which is that you need a special three-bolt puller to remove it. The Forever Sharp spacer is drilled for both 5 on 2.75" and 6 on 2.75", so you can bolt a standard wheel puller across two of the six-pattern holes to pop the hub assembly off the splines. (The holes are threaded #10-32, same as the Grant spacer.)

 

Either spacer goes in between the column adapter and the nut. Unfortunately this leaves the end of the steering shaft slightly short of the end of the nut. I don't think it's going anywhere, but, yeah, I don't love that. I have yet to decide if it bothers me enough to take it back apart and do something about it, but I'm leaning towards swapping that nut for one that doesn't have a washer attached to it.

 

 

The turn signal cancel mechanism fought me a little bit. The APC column adapter has two holes for roll pins, which take the place of the tabs on the back of the stock wheel. The pins aren't long enough to hit the cancel lever on the switch if you push them in all the way, which I found out the hard way. The second time, I installed them about a quarter inch into the column adapter. That sorta got them working, but, strangely, only in one direction. I figured the pins were just a little too close to the center, so they weren't engaging the cancel lever properly. To fix this, I removed the turn signal stalk (as pictured below), stuck a 1/4" extension in through that hole there, and used that as a punch to gently persuade   the pins outwards a little.

 

 

This might not be the right way to do it, but the signals cancel perfectly now. Actually, they cancel a little better than they did with the stock wheel. 

 

Round and square dash have different turn signal cancel mechanisms. Square dash has a single cancel lever on the switch, and two tabs on the back of the wheel, spaced about 120* apart from each other. Round dash has two separate cancel levers on the switch, with a space between them, so Nissan moved the tabs on the wheel out to 180* to account for that space. (Square dash wheel on top, round on bottom.)

 

 

The APC hub has the 180* spacing of the round-dash, but my truck is square-dash, so the steering wheel has to turn 90* for the pins to hit the cancel lever (I think stock is about 60). I thought the factory setup was a bit trigger-happy, so I consider this an improvement.

 

 

That rounded sheet metal cover came with the column adapter, and it doesn't cover it very well. It's got a pretty big gap to the clamshell. My clamshell is a redneck abomination of my own devising, so I can't say for sure that it wouldn't match the original clamshell a little better, but I know the stock wheel was not gapped out that far. Maybe the correct kit comes with a longer cover? I'll probably make up a new one that actually fits at some point, but today is not that day.

 

I've read some complaints about the horn buttons on Grant's 3-bolt wheels. This wheel doesn't use that design. The five-bolt wheels use a self-contained horn button, which friction-fits into the trim ring. It's got two spade terminals on the back for the wires. One wire comes from the column adapter (which uses a piece of circuit board for the slip ring), and the other goes to a ring terminal, which I put under one of the three bolts holding the spacer to the column adapter. This system works just fine with the factory horn contact on the column, and I didn't have to modify or adjust anything to get it working properly. Sadly they don't have any amusing replacement horn buttons, or even a Nissan one. Just domestic brands, their own name, blank, or "4x4," in case you need reminding of that sort of thing.

 

I've driven around a bit since installing the new wheel. The leather grip feels nice, and it doesn't have a rancid mixture of hand sweat and lung dart residue festering inside of it, which is a welcome change. The smaller diameter clears my knees better, but it's not so small that I feel like I stole the wheel off the riding mower. And I like the look--it looks upgraded, without looking like I've mistaken Rat Trap for a racecar. That said, the fit and finish could be better. There's a little glue residue on the spokes, the leather wrap ends closer to the spoke slot on one side than the other, and that one out-of-place white stitch at the bottom bugs me a little. The horn trim ring has a garf under the paint, and came with some paint scratched off around one of the screw holes--screw holes which mysteriously don't exist in Grant's product picture. The picture conveniently omits the spacer with the can koozy around it, too.

 

So, yeah. This turned out to be a bit more of a can of worms than I had hoped, and if I was going to do it all over again, I don't know that I'd do all the same things. Now that it's all said and done, though, I like it, and it's staying.

 

 

One last thing: I did reach out to Grant's customer support about the adapter. Grant's tech support guy confirmed that the #3560 kit was out of stock, but said he'd managed to track one down. (Naturally I had already ordered the other kit by the time I got that email.) So if you need a Grant column adapter, try their customer support--they may be able to hook you up.

Edited July 18 by Slartibartfast

[tmoore4512]

Great write up as usual, brother!!

 

Dig the way the new wheel looks too. Nostalgic for the mini truck era!!

 

Annnd I got side tracked....what was I searching for when I came across this?

[FirstGenFreak]

Looks great, I have a Grant wheel on mine too it's over 10yo and holding up really well. , this one:

1970-1987 Dodge van Dodge pickup 2WD steering wheel no tilt MOPAR 15" TUFF WHEEL | eBay

[Slartibartfast]

Annoyingly, I just stumbled across the Grant #3560 kit, on Rockauto of all places. Wholesaler closeout, so if you need one, grab one. Wish I'd seen that earlier! Looks the same as the kit I ended up with.