OT - Lug nuts

[Tony Hwang]

Hi, She meant locking lug nut I guess.

[Kate]

Yes, that is what I meant.

[Stormin Mormon]

I've heard of driving on two or three studs, but driving on one sounds a bit daredevil.

[Stormin Mormon]

I'm not sure about chain store policies. I've seen some "torque limiters" which come in different colors. I've taken to carrying a 25 inch breaker bar, and a couple of sockets with me. The criss cross lug wrenches help, but not everyone carries one.

[Jules]

I still have a habit of carrying a bit of hollow steel pipe in my vehicles that'll slide over the end of the lug wrench - makes life really easy if stuck at the side of the road in the cold and wet with a flat.

I actually bent a 2' long, 5/8" wide wrench in getting the wheel nuts off my wife's car (first time I'd pulled them off after she'd bought it) because they'd been put on so darn tight :-(

[Stormin Mormon]

The torque extender. An old trick, but still very useful. Most factory supplied lug wrenches just aren't long enough to be useful. Hollow steel pipe works better than solid steel pipe with no hole in the middle.

The four way wrenches, sometimes called star wrenches. Work nicely for me. I lean my left side against the vehicle. Put my left foot on the left side of the wrench, push down. Pull up on the right side, with one or both hands. Seems to provide some extra torque.

[harry k]

Yeah! The usual practice in such a situation is to steal one nut from each of the other 3 wheels thus ending with 4 on that wheel.

Harry K

[harry k]

Les Schwab outlets (NW company) does it, air wrench and then manual torque. I have to call them to change a flat as even with a cruciform lug wrench I can't budge them. Last flat they had even cross trhreaded one lug nut and the lug had to broken off to get the wheel off. No apologies from the company when I complained and pointed out that carrying a spare was pointless if they were going to torque them so tight.

Harry K

[Stormin Mormon]

Would removing a lug nut from each of the other wheels help, if four studs were broken?

It's a lot of work to remove a stud from each of the other wheels. Last time I removed a stud from a front wheel, I had to pull the caliper and rotor off. From the back, necessary to pull the wheel and brake drum. Sounds like he arrived safely, some how.

[willshak]

..and so ends the saga of the missing lug nuts. I bet you learned a lot about lug nut requirements and European knockoffs. :-)

[mm]

A good idea.

I bent the standard 1960's GM lugwrench once, with my bare hands (while it was attached to a lugnut). It didn't work well after that, but it was more than made up for by the boost to my ego.

Actually, solid pipe was invented over 100 years before hollow pipe. It was intended for water supply but did not work. Four generations of the Pluterchius family worked on improving it, until the next to youngest great-grandson, Minimus Plutarchius, invented the hole.

He was apparently an idiot savant, because he was a failure in school and in other career endeavours. He was dependent on his father for support, and later on his brothers. His father had earned a modest income from royalties on the solid pipe, and Minimus might have received much larger royalties for his pipe improvement, but he was overly impressed by himself after his invention, and thought he could also handle the related legal issues. So instead of consulting with his brothers, he tried to do things on his own, and ended up getting nothing. He spent the rest of his life depending on the loyalty of his brothers for income.

[mm]

Stop kicking yourself. I make 100's of mistakes a year.

[harry k]

Ooops my bad, I overlooked the 'broken studs' bit.

Harry K

[Jules]

So I hear; they tried weaving big buckets with it, but just couldn't get the gaps watertight due to the poor manufacturing tolerances of the day.

The material removed when making the hole could of course be used to make smaller-diameter solid pipes, intended for supplying smaller sizes of water.

[Tony]

Actually a vacuum doesn't suck. The outside air pressure pushes the air in. Really.

[Tony]

LOL, I knew this would get good. LOL Maybe they have one big nut like on race cars?

[Stormin Mormon]

Let us never say that people in olden days were stupid, or lacked resourcefulness.

[mm]

But in what way is that different from any other sucking? So if sucking exists at all, doesnt' the vacuum cleaner suck?

Doesn't suck mean, "create a partial vacuum so the outside air pressure pushes air in"?

[Anonymous]

Bunch of asshole pranksters removed ALL the lugnuts from one rear wheel. The wheel flew off when the car got up to speed. Fortunatly, no one was hurt.... but there was damage.