BANGALORE: Four city-based mechanical engineering students have made a simple machine that just might transform the way people change automobile wheels and render the traditional spanner obsolete. The innovation, which the students call a “wheel remover”, is capable of removing a wheel in just about three minutes which would otherwise take much longer.
A team of four students of Sambhram Institute of Technology comprising Tapan Bej, Raghu HS, Mohan Raju and Mohammed Zabiulla, under the guidance of Professor Veeranna DK built the wheel remover at a cost of about Rs 20,000. “It cost us a lot because it was a first. If we mass produce it will be much cheaper,” said Tapan.
“We observed that when the wheels of a car are to be loosened/ tightened, the conventional spanner or impact wrench is used to remove the nuts which consumes a lot of time. Our device, which is also a manually powered device could do the same work in less than one fourths of the time required to remove a wheel in the conventional way,” said Tapan.
The device consists of one driver gear, four driven gears, fixed annulus, spanner heads, plate, lever, jack, shaft, bearings and a base. The students claim that the advantage of the device is that it is portable and uses no external power source and relies on manual power. “It also simplifies the whole excersise of removing/ fixing a wheel,” says Tapan. According to Tapan, the model is also much cheaper when compared to other devices capable of performing the same operations available in the market.