Yesterday was a semi-nice day, so I decided to catch up on some maintenance --oil and filter change (M1 the Puro 30001 sure works nice on a 4.0!), TB cleaning, new Puro air filter, front-end lube, powerwash engine and fenderwells, a quick run through the local car wash, the usual. Work is slow right now and I'm bored.
I later decided to go the extra mile and do a 4-wheel tire rotation and change out those el-cheapo OEM lug nuts with a good set of heavily chromed, forged steel lugs. While I had one side up in the air doing my thing, a neighbor commented on my practice of applying bearing grease to the studs before torquing the nuts down to 90 ft/lbs.
He claims that it's a bad practice, and that the lugs will loosen over time because of it. I politely disagreed, saying that it is the friction between the tapered nut face and the wheel that keeps everything tight rather than friction from fastener threadfaces, and that the only real way to get good, accurate, consistant torque is to put a TINY BIT of lubricant on the threads before reassembly.
I know this all sounds petty, but I'm wondering if anyone here has heard of mishaps that were the direct result of 'lug nut greasin'? I like knowing that the nuts will spin off easily many years later and won't rust up, no matter how much muck I plow through. And I make sure everything is cool to the touch before everthing gets tightened down
--all pretty common sense stuff IMO.
Am I offbase here? Admittedly, this is 'old-school' technology, but it makes a lot of sense to me, much like 'priming' the engine after an oil change before actually firing it up. (Yeah, I do that too; I disconnect the crank sensor, then reset the MIL when I'm done.)
-JD