How to PROPERLY Install a Quick Release Steering Wheel (with Working Horn)

Hey guys Chris fix up here and today I'm going to show you how to

install

a

quick

release

steering

wheel

on your track car and cover everything you need to know from start to finish in detail that way when you're. After watching this video, you will be able to safely and

properly

install

your own

quick

release

steering

wheel

in your car. Now you might be wondering what a quick release steering wheel does and if it's really necessary, so let me show you if you're going to race, if you're going to drift, there's a good chance you'll need a roll cage.

You can see we have a roll cage right here so you can't slide in and out of the car like you do. We are used to the car without a roll cage, which makes getting in and out very difficult. Also, we have a racing seat and it is a Halo racing seat to protect our necks in case of an accident. This is a fixed bucket seat. It doesn't move, it's bolted to the chassis and that makes it very difficult to get in and out of because I mean, look at this space you have here, that's it, so you need to be able to get in and out of that place. and that could be very dangerous if you need to get out of the car quickly, why don't you let me show you?

So let's get in the car and notice that I have all my racing gear on and this adds to the difficulty I have in readjusting my legs and my body that way I could slide one leg at a time and then make sure I don't hit your head against the roll cage. Well, now getting out is just as difficult. What I like to do is sit in the cage first and then. He sticks one leg out and then he sticks out the other and you can see again the steering wheel is getting in the way and making me trip and I think that demonstration speaks for itself, there's just not a lot of room here to get in and out. with an original steering wheel that is not removable, so a quick release will make it quicker and easier to get out of the car, it will be more stylish and it will be much safer, now talking about safety, what I am about to do.

What I'm saying is very, very important, some of you may not want to hear, but it's the truth and I need you to listen, so if your car is going to be used on the street, it's a tram and it comes with a bag of air, that airbag should cannot be removed, please, please do not remove the airbag. These cars with airbags have crash structures that are designed to work in conjunction with the airbag. If you remove it, you could be seriously injured or killed. It takes one accident to change the rest of your life it's not worth it so what you could do to have a custom steering wheel is send your original steering wheel and they could do things like add carbon fiber, check out this blue carbon fiber here , it looks absolutely beautiful, this is the one with the sun. steering wheel they added my logo on the bottom and it keeps the original airbag if we take a look at this this is the steering wheel for the drift sting it has an rpm light on the top which is really cool almost like a ferrari or a car from f1 or something like that, it has the red stitching and the carbon fiber and again we keep the original airbag, which is very important, so it gives you the option to have something unique, something custom, something different, if your steering wheel is too big, they can actually cut off the bottom. and make it flat like that so it's a very good option for cars that will be used on the street now if you have an older car that doesn't come with an airbag or you have a dedicated track car like this one with all the safety equipment , a roll cage, a six point harness, we have our helmet, our neck restraint, a racing seat, all of this works together so you don't need an airbag and a quick release is actually a good option so please if it has a stock airbag don't remove it it's very important I know you see people with no airbag and quick releases on the street but it's not a sure thing and I just wanted to mention it very quickly because safety is very important, I want to give you guys the best information so you can make your own decisions now.

That said, here are all the tools and products you need to get this job done and install your own quick release steering wheel, as always, we use common hand tools so you can. You can do this at home yourself, no problem. We will use a medium strength threadlocker so that our steering wheel does not come loose after installing it. If you're going to install a speaker, I'll show you how to do it. Do I have a cool trick for using these breadboard connectors to connect directly to the original clockspring? It's really easy. I'll show you and now there are three main parts to installing a quick release.

The first part is the hub adapter. it's specific to your vehicle so this is specific to BMW they make them for all different makes and models then we have our quick release adapter that mounts to this and then we have our steering wheel that mounts to the release adapter fast. Now I have two addresses. wheels so I can show you the differences between different wheels so you can choose the right one for your application now with wheels there is no standardization there is no fia certification there is no sfi certification they are talking about doing it but they haven't done that at the time of this filming so Manufacturers can build whatever they want and there is no crash testing or anything like that, it is very important that you buy a brand you trust.

I know omp makes our racing seat, they make our fire suppression system, they are a well known racing brand and this is a high end steering wheel, don't waste the wheel on your steering wheel, don't buy a no name brand and I have here why so this is my friend that guy in blue and he just unbuckled his old quick release steering wheel and he was trying to get the hub out by pulling it and this happened oh that's not good oh no no now that was just pulling on it imagine the forces in an accident that could be much greater this steering wheel definitely should not break that easily and this makes it incredibly dangerous so it is very important to get a high quality steering wheel and the last thing I will show you is how to install a button like this on your steering wheel for a line. nitrous lock for two step or in our case we will use it for radio communications the driver will be able to press this and then talk to the crew in the pits and then we also have one of these hangers that will mount on the roll cage so we can hang our steering wheel when not in use so I'll be sure to link all of these tools and products in the description so you can find them easily and one last thing we need to make our safety glasses beautiful.

Let's get started and the first thing we need to do is remove the original steering wheel now, before we go and remove the original steering wheel, there are two quick things we need to do: First, take your key and put it in the running position like that. You could turn the steering wheel and straighten it out. It is very important that the steering wheel is straight so that when we install the new steering wheel it is straight and not crooked. Once it's straight, you can take out the key and then turn the steering wheel. it rolls just a little and locks into place and now it's locked and doesn't spin by accident.

It also makes removing the steering wheel bolt much easier when it's locked, so with our steering wheel straight you can see that our tires are Okay now what we're going to do is disconnect the battery and this is very important because we're going to remove the airbag and every time you touch the airbag you always want to disconnect the battery and more specifically you want to disconnect the negative battery cable and this is a 10 millimeter nut so loosen it and then remove the cable and move it to the side so it can't touch the battery post by accident and now our battery is completely disconnected. 15 to 20 minutes later those airbag capacitors should be completely discharged and we could safely remove our airbag, so on most vehicles on the side of the steering wheel there will be two holes that you can see Right there, we have one hole and the other. holes directly on the opposite side and these holes give you access to screws or in the case of BMW they like to use springs so let me show you how to remove it so take a flat head screwdriver and slide it into the hole on the side of the steering wheel and then you want to push in against the spring inside the steering wheel and then this side of the air bag should come loose and now we can go and do the same thing on the other side, push the screwdriver into the hole and then push in against the spring and remove the air bag like this.

Now with the airbag loose there are two wires connected to the airbag that need to be removed so to remove them use your flat head screwdriver and pry up the plastic retaining clip that way and then we can pull the whole clip out. up and out of the air bag. Now do the same with the other connector. Lift up the plastic retaining clip and then we can remove the entire clip from the back of the airbag and now our airbag is free and can be removed. And so you have more of an angle with the airbag removed, you can see there's the spring and then right up in this corner which is where our screwdriver will fit and then we'll just push the spring like this and You can see the spring is moving and that clicks on the airbag when you move the spring all the way that way, so that's all there is to it to remove an airbag from your car.

Not everyone drives a BMW, so how do you remove it? from another car, well let me show you, this toyota is a perfect example of how to remove most airbags, so you can see this piece of trim here that needs to be removed and you can see where someone has already done it in the past and it was damaged. and a trick so that we don't damage it even more is to cover the screwdriver with electrical tape and then, when we insert it here to remove it, it won't damage the plastic, so now that we remove it we have access to the bolt.

We have to unscrew it right there, so let's loosen this bolt really well and a lot of times these bolts don't come out all the way. You can actually see that it's held in place by a plastic retainer to prevent the bolt from falling out, so with the bolt unscrewed. Now we can go to the other side of the steering wheel and do the exact same thing, carefully pull out the plastic trim, then loosen the bolt and now the airbag can carefully come out so we can remove the wires like on the BMW. use a flat head screwdriver to pry the plastic tab on the top of each of the connectors and then both connectors will come out and then on this specific air pocket we need to remove a ground wire that comes off and now we can remove the airbag, so with the airbag was removed a safety tip when

working

with airbags always place the airbag somewhere up never look down on it if you look down on it like this and it will If you fire for any reason, it will eject, but if you look up and the airbag goes off, it will just explode and you'll be fine, but we don't have to worry about that, the airbags don't go off, they're disconnected, you'll be fine, that's it. gives you a good idea of ​​how similar removing the airbags in other cars is now to removing the steering wheel, all you need to do is unscrew this bolt right here, so let's go back to the BMW and remove our steering wheel right now, back on the BMW, the steering wheel is held on by that bolt there. a 16 millimeter and there's also a couple of electrical connectors attached that we need to remove that way we can remove the wheel and this is a really good time to explain how the

horn

works that way.

You already know how to connect it. I reconnected the battery real quick so I could show you how this

horn

works so this metal plate right here is where the airbag is located and you would press the airbag to press the horn so this is what happens , look at this, so when this metal plate comes into contact with the metal underneath it creates a closed circuit so that the electricity can flow and the horn can be and you can see here there is an electrical connector that connects to this metal plate and then here is another electrical connector that connects to that metal plate. so we need these two wires to complete our circuit for our speaker so that our wire is easily identifiable, we can see exactly where it goes, it goes to the last pin of that yellow connector, so that's nice and simple, now we need to remove this one.

That way we could see where it goes, so let's remove the wires from this plastic holder and then we need to remove this tape that holds the wires together, so with the tape removed from the wires, if we follow that brown and orange wire, look on the right. next to the brown and black wire that we're looking at, so if we look closer, the brown and orange and the brown and black are the two wires at the end, here those are the two wires that we need to use to connect to our horn, so what we could do is disconnect this yellow connector.

We could also get this one out of the way and we'll just connect the jumpers on our board to each of those pins, no matter what color it goes. what pin we only need tomake a good connection now we have our two jumper wires from the breadboard and now if we touch the ends here the horn should sound let's listen well so those are the two wires that we need to connect to our horn in the closure fast. and that's all there is to it to figure out how to make your horn work nice and simple and I'll show you how to attach this when we have the quick release for now we could take them off and we'll remove this 16 millimeter bolt so we can remove our steering wheel, so put a ratchet on that bolt and I have an extendable ratchet, which is nice because it gives you that extra leverage to loosen that bolt.

Now we can remove the bolt the rest of the way by hand. bolt removedlet's move it a little and pull it out and that's all there is to it to remove the steering wheel, it's that simple, one bolt, a couple of electrical connectors and voila, this is the spring for your watch, so If you ever need it replace this, that's how you get to it, you don't want it to spin. Luckily on the BMW it locks into place when the wheel is removed but on other cars this doesn't lock into place so it could spin and if it does you could easily. damage the internal wires it has to stay in place don't turn this now unfortunately not all steering wheels come off that easily some of them you need one of these this is a steering wheel puller i will put a link in the description to where you can get it easily it's cheap or you can rent it for free at a lot of auto parts stores and for some cars you need to have a steering wheel puller because the steering wheel presses against the hub here so real quick let me show you how this. works on the drift mount, first screw in the bolt that holds the steering wheel just a few threads so the puller has something to push against, then look for the correct size bolts from the kit that fit the holes in the steering wheel and you can see these Bolt holes built into the flywheel that are designed to work with that puller.

Now your pump comes with a ton of different accessories. In this case, I'm going to use this accessory that will fit nicely over our bolt and then we can grab our two bolts and hand tighten them so they don't cross over. Now we can start to tighten this, which should remove the steering wheel and with that sound, the steering wheel is now loose and we can also remove the puller. Don't forget about that Torx bolt and that's all there is to removing a press-fit steering wheel. Okay, with the steering wheel removed we're almost done, all that's left is to attach our new steering wheel and that will start our center here. which slides right over the splines of our steering shaft just like that and we're going to screw it in, but first you can see that it's hard to access our clock spring here, so what we're going to do is put our wires into these. pins so we can connect our speaker, so let's put the breadboard connector on the last pin on the right and make sure it fits well and then put the other breadboard connector on the pin right next to it and again let's make sure it clicks. and while this isn't completely necessary, I like to make sure these connectors don't come off, so I'm using some liquid electrical tape that you can drip onto the connector that way and it will absorb into the environment. area and it's going to hold these connectors, so they're probably not going to come out right and with both cables connected now we could put our adapter here and run those cables like this and very quickly, I wanted to show you. that the steering shaft has splines and so does our hub adapter so when we put the hub on it's very important you can see it says top right we want this hole to be facing up so adjust the splines so it's straight upwards. way our steering wheel will be straight up and then once it's aligned push it into the splines so with our hub fully seated and it's straight now what we can do is grab our bolt and put on some threadlocker of medium strength on the threads and this is I'm going to prevent the bolt from coming out due to vibrations, which definitely wouldn't be good, so hand tighten the bolt all the way and torque it to your car's specifications, which in in this case it's 46 pound-feet for this BMW, so with that torque. down below now we need to connect our quick release hub, but first on the back here we have two wires for our speaker that we need to connect to these two wires, so on the back of our quick release hub we have a male blade connector and female, so I have a male and female blade connector so we can connect it to our wires here, so let's cut the ends of these wires, then we want to strip our red wire, so let's strip the insulation off the wire to expose the metal underneath nicely and now.

We can put our female blade connector into the crimper and put the wire into the connector and crimp that connector like this and you always want to test the crimp by pulling on the wire to make sure it doesn't come out and This is fine so let's do the black wire again , let's remove the insulation, then put the wire into the blade connector and finally crimp it and give it a good pull to make sure the crimp is nice and tight, so with our connectors crimped we can now connect our quick release hub, so let's connect these cables like this and this beautiful, you want to make sure that these cables don't have any exposed metal because you don't want to ground here, you don't want to We have shorts against each other and they're both protected by these sleeves, so what we're going to do do is tuck in our cables and set up our quick release hub that way.

Now you can see that the top of the quick release center has that. A little spot there means one should be facing up and that's when we could get a screw with some medium strength threadlocker on it and thread our first screw into the top to hold it in place now just to let you know this. The screws do not come with the quick release hub, so you will have to pick up your own screws. These are m5 and I ended up buying the m5-16 so they are 16 millimeters long and the perfect length. We'll leave a link to these in the description, so now we just want to hand tighten these six bolts to the hub, so now you want to tighten all of these bolts in a crisscross pattern to seat them evenly and when you tighten them.

They don't need to be super tight, but you'll definitely want to adjust them. The thread lock will make sure they don't come off, so simply tighten each one so they fit snugly and now our quick release hub is installed. Next we can set up the second part of our quickpitch, which is this quickpitch center so you can see there's a point right there, that point has to line up with that point and that's how you know it's in a straight line, so now it's there. it won't come loose and to remove it, pull it back and it will come loose and finally we can install our steering wheel which will bolt down to that hub.

Now we have a button bracket here that we need to go install first. that will continue like this and then our steering wheel will continue like this so just line up those holes and hand tighten the six screws into place and all of these screws have a medium strength threadlocker, that way we know they won't back off due to vibrations one Once hand tight, go back and tighten those screws in a crisscross pattern to evenly seat the steering wheel against the quick release hub and finally we have one last thing to do and that is install our horn now. the back of the speaker has two male ends again, it doesn't matter which connector goes to which, but as you can see, we have a female end that will work here, but we have a male end here, so we need to cut it off and crimp another one. female connector, so let's cut off our male connector, then we could strip the insulation off the end of the wire and then we could take our female blade connector and crimp it like this, now we'll give it the old pull test and this is fine. let's put both connectors on the back of the horn and make sure to press both connectors really tight like this and finally we can push the horn into place on the steering wheel.

Okay, with the battery connected, let's try this. the speaker works perfect and it disconnects look that's beautiful okay it's done and I still want to show you how to install that button so we have a button here for our communications or whatever you want to use it for but real. Quick, I got several flyers so I can show you how to choose the right flyer for your application, so let me show you real quick. Now there are five main things you should look for when choosing a steering wheel. cover them quickly starting with materials. Now, for most track cars, you'll want a steering wheel that has good grip and the suede will give you that grip, but there are situations like drifting where you may want the steering wheel to slip between your hands and the leather.

It gives you that grip. You get some grip and it also gives you a little bit of slip and you actually prefer leather for drifting, but for our wheel to wheel racing, we're going to use chamois next. We have shapes and steering wheels come in different shapes, but there are two most common ones around the world. one and the bottom cut out for most applications, you'll probably want the round one, especially if you're doing more than 180 degree turns with the steering wheel, but if your car is very narrow and there's not much legroom. It may need a cutout at the bottom to give it more legroom, that's not a problem with our car so we're going to go with a round one.

Next we have the diameter of the wheel, the original wheel is 380 millimeters in diameter and our replacement wheel is 350 millimeters in diameter, so it is definitely much smaller. Now a smaller steering wheel is more sensitive, so for every degree you turn the steering wheel, you will turn the car more with a smaller steering wheel than with a larger steering wheel. The downside is that the steering wheel is smaller. You have a little more effort in the steering, so if you don't have power steering you have to be careful. In this case we do have power steering so it's not a big deal, we prefer to have faster steering so a smaller wheel works better now for a larger steering wheel, if you don't have power steering it makes it easier driving with a larger steering wheel because it gives you more leverage and also for every degree you turn the steering wheel you turn it less than with a smaller steering wheel so if you don't have If you are doing high speed racing or maybe drag racing resistance, you don't want to have very high sensitivity, a larger handwheel might be better, so again it depends on your application.

Next we have the chainring, now the chainring is the distance from the mounting surface to the steering. surface and you can see that this is a deep dish wheel. Now compare it to our other wheel and you can see that our mounting surface and our gripping surface are almost uniform. It has a little bit of a plate, but not much, so let me show you. Why is this important now? Since we are in a fixed racing seat bolted to the chassis. It doesn't slide like a normal seat. The only way to change the distance between the steering wheel and me is to change the steering wheel with a different chainring, so what is the proper distance between the steering wheel and me?

All you need to do is force yourself to sit on the back of the seat and place your arms on top of the steering wheel and right where the steering wheel meets your arm, it should be at your height. wrist like that, that's perfect, so you could grab nine and three and you want to check the bend of the elbow, you want a little bit of bend like that, you don't want to be completely out and you don't want to be completely in, so this is perfect for me now, right? What about our deep dish wheel?

If we install the wheel for deep dishes, look at this. You can see my doll is out here and the wheels over here, that's too close. It's also not good when I'm nine and three years old, my elbows are tucked into my body and you can't drive like that, so this deep dish is not good and that's exactly why we now go with a shallow dish steering wheel. The last thing you should look for is the bolt pattern of your steering wheel and this is quite important because different steering wheels have different bolt patterns and depending on the steering wheel you get means you need to get the correct quick release hub that matches that bolt pattern and the correct hub adapter that matches the bolt pattern.

These are the three most common bolt patterns and the brands they go with, so depending on which brand you choose, you'll want to make sure you get a hub adapter and quick release adapter that fit that direction. handwheel, so keep that in mind, now you know how to choose the best handwheel for your application. Let's finish this video by installing our nitrous push button for our radio communications line lock and thenlet's go in. and outside the car, I'll show you the difference because the difference is huge. Okay, now we want to place the button on the bracket, so let's slide the cable all the way down until the button sits on the bracket like this.

I want to put the washer and two locknuts on the back of the button to hold it in place, so put them over the cable and slide them down to the button and now we can screw the first nut all the way down and tighten it with a wrench good, now let's take the second locknut and tighten it against the first nut like this and then hold the first nut in place while you tighten the second nut to get them together nice and that's not going anywhere next you can see we have these two holes here and that's where the wires stay in place so get a zip tie and we want to tie that wire in place so it doesn't pull tight so now that we have our button installed let's attach the steering wheel. the car and let me show you how it works, so let's connect our button to our communication radio.

Now our old communications button is connected to our gear shift here, but now we realize that this is not the best place because to use the radio, we had to take our hand off the wheel and that's not good when you're racing, so the wire from the old button goes behind the dash to this connector right here, so let's disconnect our old communications button and connect our steering wheel button and run this wiring behind the dash out of the way, so now with this installed, the problem What we have is that our cable, which is designed to stretch and wrap around the steering wheel, could also wrap around the windshield wiper and that won't be good for fixing that problem.

What we're going to do is mount the cable to the bottom of our trim. plastic right here, so let's remove the molding to remove it. We have two clips underneath, one here and one here, that need to be taken out and then this. come out so take a small screwdriver and you just want to push the center of the clip so it comes out nice and now the bottom piece should come out so this is our plastic piece and this is the bottom corner where we want to drill. the two holes to put our zip tie in, so get your drill and drill two holes in the bottom here and then we can put a zip tie through those two holes and tighten it to create a loop like this and then cut the end off. that zip tie so it's neat and check it now that we have our loop now let's put the trim piece back together so it fits and then push the two clips into the bottom okay so let's put the steering wheel on and now we could tie the end of the cable to the plastic trim and the idea here is that if we ever have to remove this, we could just cut the little zip tie and not have to remove the entire plastic trim piece so that the cable wraps neatly around the steering wheel and you can see that It's not messing with the wipers or the turn signal and if you listen closely there is a strange clicking noise and unfortunately I think I know what this is, sometimes things like this happen, but it's no big deal, let's get it out of the way. the steering wheel and then let's remove the quick release hub and finally unscrew the hub adapter and take that hub out so we can see what the noise is so remember that locking clip that prevents the clock spring from rotating when the steering wheel is off.

Well, I had a feeling this might be a problem: the stock wheel pushes down on this clip, but the aftermarket hub adapter doesn't, so let's take this clip out and then take the other one out as well so it doesn't come loose. way and now we can reinstall the hub adapter, tighten the bolt, reattach the horn and with the snap of my fingers, all the bolts tighten up nicely, so now let's try it again, and now it's much better, like this It's how it should sound. from the start no more clicking and the cable to the button is perfectly secured and the horn still works so now we are going to install our wheel mount that will go right here.

This is an aluminum wheel carrier and it just clamps around the roll cage like that and then these two bolts hand tighten there and then we'll just tighten it up to attach the carrier to the roll cage and now every time we need to get out of the car, simply place the wheel on the stand and you can see I'm ready again and see how quick and easy it is to get out of the car. It's much safer without the original steering wheel in the way and getting back in is also much quicker and easier when you don't.

We don't have that steering wheel there, so now let's try the radio communication in the car, our pit crew, we'll have a headset connected to this, it's basically like a walkie-talkie, a long range one and then inside. in our car we have our walkie-talkie and we turn it on here we are on channel one this goes to the car antenna and this goes to our communications button and also to our headphones so we can talk and hear well Let's put the steering wheel and let's try this, so we are at the track testing one, two, one, two, three, perfect and we have successfully installed a quick release steering wheel, so there you go, this is how to

properly

install a quick release steering wheel. including the speaker wiring and that extra button and check it out, it works perfect, that's amazing, I love it.

I hope this video was helpful if so, remember to like it if you're not a subscriber, consider hitting the subscribe button for more information. Car how-to videos like this, we have some good ones on the way including a battery cutout and how to install a fire suppression system and as always all the tools and products I used in this video will be linked in the description so you can find them easily