Do I have to disconnect the battery before installing?
New steering wheel installed LX470 (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Ls430
- Start date
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Yes. I always do when working with an air bag.
Not yet. I'm actually working for work most of the weekend. Then my home HVAC unit blew up yesterday.
As soon as the new wheel arrived, all hell broke loose. LOL I'm looking forward to installing it.
Just covered my wheel in new leather wrap! It makes the wheel a bit beefier. Looks great, but a lot of work sewing it on. Took mytime to get it right. Some of the joints i had to cut the leather As it was a bit too large. Took about 6 hours to do the whole thing. I was thinking of replacing it with one like was posted here, but decided to wrap. I found that vivid racing can modify a wheel, which may be a preferable but expensive option. Check out their pics On their site for the tundra wheel modification. Looks much better than oem or replacements. I actually ordered one of their wheels for my new jaguar!
See my post in this thread. I got my wrap from china “Loncky”.
Installed it tonight. I rubbed the leather part with some Meguiars Leather Balm. The leather soaked it up and helped it match the horn plastic.
Nice!
How does it feel when driving?
Still have the front work end to finish before I can drive it.. Lots to do yet.
Looks great! Could you post daytime photos showing the dash wood trim too? Looks like it’s a good match
That looks fantastic. Excellent work. What is the color you selected and do have to specify the perforated and non-perforated areas. That is exactly what I want.
The color was dark grey. the onlt other color they have is black. The grey is almost an exact match, one can hardly tell the difference, which was a plus! I'm lovin it. It is like a brand new wheel! The leather is really nice. You decide which areas you want perforated. There is the top, sides and bottom. I went with the dark grey stiching, but you can also choose a contrasting color.
I looked at their youtube videos and others from different manufact. several times to make sure I did mine correctly. This helped a lot. The only issue with the cover is that at the spokes, the leather wrap is a bit large and needs to be trimmed. The wrap should wrap around the wheel and spokes and just barely come together with no gap after you sew it together. However, at the spokes the leather is too big and overlaps. You need to do 2 things here. First is measure and cut the leather so it meets and does not overlap. Do this when fitting the wrap on the wheel before you put the double sided tape on. Make sure all spokes look good. Second and most important, after you cut the excess off, you will have cut off the stitches on the wrap, and you will need to sew on new stitches in order to sew the wrap together. The 2 pictures show a bit of leather wrap (note that the wrap has stitches on both top and bottom and these are what you sew together) and the wrap sewed around spoke.
(The leather may also be too long and you cannot fold it under the plastic parts of the spokes and this will have to be trimmed as well, but this can be done after you sew it on and are fitting it around the spokes). See diagram below for explanation. After you fit the cover and cut the leather to fit around the spokes so they do not overlap, then remove the cover and do the stitching. It is so much easier to stitch it off the wheel than what I did. Also, they give you plenty of thread, so double it up when you sew it on the wheel. I only did single thread. Remember take the time to fit it on properly cut the leather at the spokes only if they overlap to much, sew on new stitches, refit, and then pull off the double sided tape and streatch the leather around the wheel bit by bit to get a perfect fit (do one section at a time, and leave the long top part for the last), and then sew it on! Hope this helps. It will take you >5 hours to do this so make sure you dont need the car!
OwnerCS and I both bought our wheels on eBay, (LX470 1998-2002 STEERING WHEEL OE CLASSIC WOOD BEIGE V2 for LEXUS). I bought the wheel with the V2 in the title. It came perforated, OwnerCS bought his without the V2 and it is NOT perforated. I can only assume the V2 indicates perforation.
My new wheel was installed last week. It looks great! I had to replace a couple bushings but all is good.
prwillard2
SILVER Star
What bushing did you change?
Not sure, I had mechanic do it.
Just my received steering wheel back from @katit - who did an amazing job replacing the leather on my steering wheel (an 06 LX). Pictures below speak for themselves, but this is the gold standard in my opinion for those looking for a true "factory" caliber wheel repair. Perfect match color-wise; clean stitching and leather feels great. In terms of taking the wheel off, I am fairly novice but followed advice in this thread (eg removing battery connector) and took pictures along the way for reference. Used tape with markups to ensure it went back on in the same spot. Only real issue I ran into was actually getting the wheel off - after removing the 19mm nut had to knock it fairly hard side to side before it would pull off. All in all, for those considering the project, it is an easy but big upgrade to driving experience.
Anyone bought the eBay wheel recently? I can’t find the one that matches my LX
Tan/ Oak interior?
