Can you teach me more about lug bolts & related tire tools?

It's still nice to know that you can get the same angle effect out of a six point socket that you can out of a 12-point socket, simply by rotating the

Personally, my tools just "grew" over time, where I have some 12 points and some 6 points where some are normal sockets, deep sockets, and impact sockets, where I wish I had known what I'm learning in this thread in the beginning.

Seems to me that the /first/ set anyone should get are normal length & deep six-point sockets (both metric & SAE).

The metric & SAE 12-point sets should come next, I would think.

certainly, but there is no need for such precision in this application.

I realize all the responses (so far) to this post were trolls or jokes, but if you were actually serious, please do read my explanation below of what I feel is the inherent value in rotating tires periodically.

In my case, the suspension is aligned (caster, camber, and toe anyway), and tires are selected, mounted, and balanced (statically), and pressurized, and repaired (from the inside with a patchplug), and rotated by me, so everything about those tires is up to me, and not to a mechanic who is paid by the hour who might skip some of the steps that I do (see below) to save time.

Of course, I can only meticulously statically balance the wheel-and-tire assembly, but the dynamic-balance test of driving at speeds shows no dynamic imbalance that can be felt by the driver.

Given the well-aligned vehicle is driven daily on mountainous hilly steep very windy roads, including a mandatory K-turn daily, the fronts inevitably develop a unidirectional feathering that can be barely felt by the hand which is palpable consistently at around 4K miles.

Since the spare is a different brand, I rotate in the classic four-wheel II->X->II->X pattern that puts each tire at each of the four corners over a period of 12K miles (about 8 to 10 months of driving) - and - when I rotate

- I inspect the entire carcass for pebbles & shards as shown here from this weekend.

To overcome some of the boredom of plucking detritus out of the tread, I count the objects removed, where there are always more than 50 per tire, so I try to approach a count of 100 objects removed, some of which turn out to be this (staple?) shard I found yesterday.

While you intimate that the periodic inspection and rotation of tires has "gone out of style", my reasonably logical position is that the selection, mounting, balancing, pressurizing, inspection, repair, and rotation of tires is a reasonable and rational act that results in increased safety and life of the tires - partly because removing something like this shard never goes out of style!

These telescopic bars have a normal 1/2 inch square drive that any 1/2 drive socket can fit into. You don't have to use the socket it comes with.

It's not a torque wrench - its just a wrench with a telescopic handle that is at least twice as long as that which normally comes with the car kit. It gives you much more leverage when trying to free the nut. It's the same principle of adding a scaffolding over over an existing wrench bar to make it longer.

It you added an extension tube to the end of a normal click type torque wrench to make the handle twice as long and you applied your pressure to the end this extension wouldn't the torque wrench still click at the correct torque?

Oh. Thanks. That's good because any decent toolbox has a set of 1/4", 3/8", and 1/2" metric and SAE sockets.

Hmmmm... I just realized that those socket sizes are in SAE units, and not in metric units.

Do the 4-sided openings in European sockets conform to the same standard

Oh. I see. Yes. We all have used a pipe in times of need, to extend our leverage. Most of us have pretty long "breaker bars" though, which is what I would use if I needed the torque to remove a bolt.

It would as long as the only point of that loosely fitting extension tube touching the torque wrench were at the place that you would have put your hand on the torque wrench.

I guess if you put a tightly fitting extension tube over the torque wrench of a length that doubles the torque wrench length, then you'd get a "reading" of (half? double?) on the torque wrench.

Let me think about that.... (would it be double or half?).

Upon a few moments of circumspection, I'm not sure, but I think you'd get a reading that is half what it actually is??????

Different picture

Yep, standard 1/4, 3/8 and 1/2 square drives which can be used with both imperial and metric hex/12 point sockets.

You can place you hands on any part of a click type torque wrench to get it to work correctly.

No, the end of the torque wrench would move exactly the same distance. The end of the extension would move by twice the distance as the end of the torque wrench.

That's strange that Europeans use a half-metric half-what-you-call-Imperial standard of units.

To us, Imperial is a strange word, where it often means Imperial Japan or Imperial British (meaning before WWII in our vernacular), but we never use the word "imperial" in terms of measurement units (at least I don't).

I have seen "imperial gallons" where I have to ask what they are, since we just have gallons and liters and nothing else (similarly with regular tons and long tons I guess).

I guess, since the US is anything but imperial, that the term must be so old as to predate the SAE, and to relate to Imperial British units?

I thought all torque wrenches needed your hand in a certain given spot?

OK. I'm confused because I have a dial-type wrench which has a pin which certainly is to prevent you from putting force at any other point for this reason alone....

If my car's service warning light comes on, I remove the bulb. If the car makes a smell, a noise, or fails to run properly, THEN I get it serviced.

Really, you seriously need to get a life.

They measure torque at the head of the wrench, not the end of the handle. Take a wrench with a 2 foot handle. Say it takes 50 pounds of force at the end of the handle to loosen a nut. Take a wrench with a 4 foot handle. It will take 25 pounds of force at the end of the that one's handle to loosen the same nut. That's why cheater pipes work.

Classic beam scale torque wrenches do indeed rely on a single point load which is why the handle has a pivot pin. Your comments are correct for click wrenches.

No quote.

Is it this hard to put on a tire? Tighten till tight.

Not necessarily the rest of Europe but the UK.

I'm now retired and during my schooling it was mainly the metric system that was taught.

In the UK we still use a imperial units for some items. Beer in pubs is sold in pints and not litres. Vehicle speed and road signs are still in miles and not kilometres. Manufactures/dealers still refer to petrol consumption in miles per gallon even though petrol has been sold by the litre for 3 decades or more.

I was an engineer by profession and only used metric my whole working life for the job.

Some non-metric items are throwback to history - they have been that way for hundreds of years and haven't changed.

We only say gallons BUT when talking to the ex-colonies we have to say 'Imperial' because your pints and gallons are different from ours.

There is also the tonne = 1,000 kg

I don't get the why if this is what you mean by beam scale torque wrench. or

Oh crap. Is this myth still floating around? We're not measuring *movement*, we're measuring *torque*. Place a 100 pound weight on one end of a 5-foot long teeter-totter. How much weight do you add to the other end to balance it? Place a 100 pound weight on one end of a mile long teeter-totter. Same question. (PS: You'll get the same answer)

Back to the actual question:

Yep that's the style. Scale reading assumes the load is at the handle pivot pin.

I show both types of torque wrenches in my original post, reproduced below.

The "beam style" (with the black handle & red pointer) has a "pivot pin" to ensure that your force is applied at a single point of contact on the bar.

How tight?