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

I agree that a headlamp has advantages, as does a magnetic lamp, where one of each might be perfect redundancy for a nighttime emergency at the side of the road.

Compared to what's in my pocket at the moment...

After using it for a few years, I'm not that crazy about the tanto style, but it is good for prying out nails.

I mount the knobbies on the DR-650 myself but don't bother with the balance except for lining the dot up if there is one. With DOT knobbies it is sort of hard to tell if it's balanced or not. The last time around I went with Kendas and getting the bead to seat on the front was an adventure. I never had a problem with Dunlop 606's.

I take the ones with tubeless tires to a shop. After watching an guy trying to get the bead to seat on a Bridgestone as the sun sank into the west I was skeptical of my abilities. He had a high flow air system, the tourniquet, and so forth but it was a struggle. I might take a shot at it in the spring. I've got a slow leak around the bead on the Harley that needs to be cleaned up so it won't be a complete demount.

Truck tires are just bigger :) I watched a guy in Canada fix one in place. He had me drive the inside dual up on blocks to get clearance, spudded it off, patched it, and put it back on. I think he'd done it that way once or twice.

My first DIY attempt was with a '51 Chevy. iirc, the owners manual had an illustration of breaking the bead by putting the bumper jack on it. All I managed to do was jack the car up.

I'm driving on a plugged tire right now. Last Saturday I was 600 miles from home and the only shop nearby was a truck shop. He plugged it but did not have the proper equipment to play with my wheels. I put about

The drywall screw removed it still usable too!

Jesus. That's battle gear for heaven's sake!

This is what I consider to be a typical pocket knife.

The Harbor Freight tire mounting tool has an accessory for mounting motorcycle tires, but the HF static bubble balancer does not. AFAIK, most people statically balance motorcycle tires using a horizontal freely spinning bar, do they not?

I did bike tires in the 80s, before they were typically as fat as they are now (especially the rears), where it wasn't hard in the olden days, with a good tire iron and three hands.

I find that car tires are easiest on the import economy vehicles, and almost as easy on the European sport vehicles, but the sidewall and larger profile makes SUVs harder (at least the ones I've done), where I just ass-u-me that truck tires would be even worse.

I've seen every redneck method of breaking a bead that YouTube can fester, where the purpose-built HF bead breaker is the tool of choice for the home owner.

The main flaw of that bead breaker is that they try to limit the diameter of the wheels you can break the bead on by limiting the overall length of the teardrop-shaped base - so you have to "extend" the base by putting a board over it and then the wheel on top of that board.

The bead breaker attachment that comes standard with the HF tire mounting tool works fine on the import economy vehicles, and even works on the European sports cars, but it fails miserably (it bends out of shape) on the SUV tires I've tried.

I agree with you that reasonable men have successfully plugged a tire from the outside after pulling out the offending nail or screw, but we can't argue too hard since the logic of the inside path is that it supposedly stands the test of time and the elements better.

Still, none of us are complaining that the rope plugs don't work, so it's surprising that no professionals will dare to use the method we all swear by.

It's one of the enigmas of DIY home and auto repair.

I wish I had saved a jar of all the embedded objects I've pulled out of tires over the years!

Can you say 'lawyer'? I've spent some time in southern AZ close to the border. It's refreshing to deal with Mexican mechanics. They still use a bit of ingenuity.

My winner is a screwdriver that embedded itself in the outside dual on a trailer. The handle was a little scuffed but it was still usable.

We won't go into bicycle tires. I hate goathead thorns and any place the damn thing grow.

So I'm told. I had to make a personal appearance at the SSI office a couple of weeks ago. The security guard said "You can bring in a small knife. That's a big knife.' so out to the car I went.

I've got one of those I found by the side of the road. I guess it's the Officer' model with the toothpick, tweezers, and other strange stuff. I never carried it. This is Montana; we subscribe to the Crocodile Dundee School of Knives.

Yes. I'll probably pick one up and see if it makes any difference the next time around. Knobbies give you plenty of practice. 5K on the rear is doing good.

I haven't used it yet but I picked one of these up:

The DR is 4.75 x 17 for the rear and 3.00 x 21 for the front although I've run 5.10 on the rear. They're started to go to the 120/90 stuff for knobbies but I'm used to the older sizing.

BIG tools :) Breaking the beads with a sledge hammer, or rather something like a cross head splitting maul is common.

Back in the '60s Harbor Freight and Chinese stuff was well in the future. Real tools cost real money. The cellar had a door through a poured concrete wall that was sturdy. You could do strange stuff with a scissors jack. You could also launch stuff when you were trying to compress the coil springs on your Healey... I was literally a shade tree mechanic. There was a handy maple with a branch that was just right for pulling engines. Much ambition, little money, get 'er done.

heh heh ..., I remember those red cellar doors, at an angle to the house, from ground level to about two feet, with the lock on the inside that was always making that scraping sound that chills your spine, and then those solid concrete steps down. Yup. I haven't seen them in years either.

I don't know when HF came into existence, but thank God they did, as, well, for about $150 or $200, you get all the tools you need for changing and statically balancing tires that you don't already have, which means they pay for themselves in just about 10 tire changes, which, for me, is only a year or two (what with 4 cars to maintain).

The one thing I WISH HF had was a smoke machine, as those bimmers sure do find funny places to leak air!

Carry the former in the UK and you would probably be arrested if stopped or if you used it in public.

ultred ragnusen explained on 18/02/2018 :

I can imagine, when building them that they simply check the calibration on a pass / fail basis. The only way I can think to adjust them is via shims under the spring, to increase the tension.

ultred ragnusen wrote on 18/02/2018 :

I place a hand on the head of the wrench to support it, whilst pressing down for the click, so the extension should make little difference.

To help keep the pretty chrome covers from coming off the actual nut. Dimples not cuts

It's the same torque in the rotational direction. But there's some downforce on the end of the extension and that gets magnified. Of course you resist it with your hand, but if you don't do that well you pull the socket off sideways and round the nut.

In the factory where we needed a cheater bar on most bolts, there was no point in trying a 12 point, you'd round the bolt head every time. We used 6 points except where you needed a 4 or 8 point.

From what I saw on YouTube, there's an SAE standard for calibration of torque wrenches, which, as I remember from the video of a day or two ago, comprises three sets of five tests, summarized (from memory) as:

1. Unmeasured five full-torque applications (e.g., 150 foot pounds)
2. Measured, five 20% torque applications (e.g., 30 foot pounds)
3. Measured, five 60% applications (e.g., 90 foot pounds)

Average it all out and you get your percentage error.

If the error is worse than what you desire, you adjust the calibration of the torque wrench (where some have hex adjustments of spring tension, others have twist adjustments, others have bend adjustments, etc.).

The nice thing about standards is that their are so many of them.

Most of the world appears to use the ISO 6789 standard.

This paper lists ISO6789, JJG 707, ANSI/ASME B107/14 & GGG 686D standards.

While the paper above says all the standards are similar, it mentions that ISO 6789 has the largest use. ANSI/ASME B107/14 is popular in the USA. GGG686 is an American military standard which is being overtaken by B107/14. And JJG 707 standard is used in China.

A key step is that the calibration device has to be within plus or minus 1 percent, which is really the difficulty for home calibrations, I think.

It's interesting to note that the calibration has to be done such that the weight of the wrench is negated, which means you can't have the wrench set horizontally and then push down on it, as gravity affects your measurements.

Also it's interesting you always calibrate "up", in that you test the smaller torques before the larger torques.

I've never calibrated my torque wrenches, where I have a few 1/2-inch drive ones (beam and click), 3/8-inch drive (click) and 1/4-inch drive (click) where all the click types are from Harbor Freight, so I'm unsure of accuracy.

The problem is to find a calibration standard that is easier to use than a bucket of water or dumbbells.

I doubt if the manufactures calibrated them. The aim would be to get it right by manufacture to what ever tolerance level is acceptable and then perhaps test each one at a single setting (without performing any adjustments) and perhaps test one in a thousand at different settings to make sure that the manufacturing process is still correct.

Proper calibration costs money and unlikely to be performed on anything other than something used for mass production where expensive calibration costs are amortised over tens or hundred of thousands of production items or individual use where safety is paramount.

Something you can buy at the local hardware store for less than £100 or $100 is unlikely to have been individually calibrated or finely adjusted. It is more likely to have had a go/no test after production.

In 1988 I found the OEM jack was barely adequate to change the tire on the F150 and stopped at Moab, UT to buy a bottle jack. I made a disparaging comment about the Chinese manufacture and the guy behind the counter said he had a made in the USA one for twice the price that wouldn't jack the truck up any higher. I still have the Chinese jack and it still works.

I use the HF sockets and wrenches in my bike toolkits. If the kit gets ripped off I can replace it for about $50 and they get the job done. Other HF purchases haven't worked as well. When it comes to HF, the fewer moving parts the better.

Thanks the Gods I don't live in the UK. I have many knives and I'm sure they are all illegal in the UK.

There's good news and bad news in these numbers.

Bearing in mind that, for home use, a few percent error is ok, all you're really looking for is a gross error.

How much is an acceptable gross error? I don't know.

Maybe 10% for a head bolt or valve cover bolt? Maybe even 20% for a lug nut?

Let's assume it's 5%. All we need is a calibration standard that is plus or minus 5% then.

That's the trick. Where do we get a calibration standard that will pay for itself?

A lot of people seem to use this $30 HF #68283 digital torque wrench adapter:

Here's the owners manual:

If I didn't already have plenty of torque wrenches, I'd buy that, but I don't need more torque wrenches as all tools have storage costs.