new spacers and studs; now sterring wheel vibrates

wstar

"Firm tapping"? Depends how firm it was, and if the tapping was delivered with a sledgehammer I've been using a little "ball joint separator" tool to press mine out instead of beating them out, something almost exactly like this thing: 3/4" Forged Ball Joint Separator. (Edit: also a good trick for installing new ones: buy a huge stack of large washers and a few cheap nuts that are the same thread as the lugnuts, stack washers over the barely-installed stud, use impact wrench w/ nut to tighten against the washer stack and seat the stud).

The hub flange itself is pretty damn thick, but what I would be more worried about than bending the flange is damaging the wheel bearings the flange rides on. If you have a dial gauge for checking e.g. rotor runout, you could try using that on the hub, but a lot of bearing issues only show up under real load, and wouldn't be apparent in the air with the wheels off. You can also try pulling on the wheels while it's lifted and seeing if you can detect unusual bearing play in one wheel relative to the others.

If it does end up being a bearing, luckily replacing bearings is easy on this car, no hydraulic press involved. The whole bearing/hub is a single unit, about $160/corner from Nissan, and you just unbolt the old one and bolt in the new one.

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