Tightening wheel nuts

They use compressed air guns - which tighten to about 80 pound - the right way would be to use a torgue wrench.

Bill

Just had a pair of Pirelli P6000s fitted at my local National tryes - they used an air-gun to remove the nuts and to quickly spin them back on

- but then finished off with a torque wrench.....

Amusing moment when the young lad took the wheels off, though and couldn't see any rear brakes ;-)

Had a small gathering of tyre fitters crawling about the rear end of the car - don't think they'd ever seen a car with rear-mounted box and inboard rear discs!

now hand tight

electric tools - is

or do they all

I think you'll find most use an air driven impact driver, or airgun, to use the vernacular. :-) IMO set to a fairly high setting to undo the nuts, and used on the same setting to do them up. Hence nuts so tight that they can be very difficult to undo using the cars std wheel wrench. AFAIK, no tyre chain like Kwik-Fit has a blanket policy on tightening wheel nuts, but if you know the correct torque setting for those on your own car, it would not be unreasonable to ask to have them tightened to that setting. Micheldever tyres is the only place I've ever used that that torqued my wheel nuts up correctly. Referring to a wall chart to set the torque wrench to the correct setting. Mike.

this is tight,

you put a socket on

damage to anything.

I'm sure anything

bar is fairly safe.

flying past you down

due

was

where

With steel wheels, or some ally wheels that have a steel c/sk insert fitted, cracking is the biggest danger IMO. Wheels have been known to break off from cars, a rare occurence to be sure, but these sort of cracks could be one cause.

The wheel nuts on a car I recently baught had been overtightened. The cone on the nuts had closed in on the studs, making them tight to unscrew all the way. Fortunately the studs and wheels appeared undamaged, so running a tap down the nuts was all that was needed put things right. Mike.

Don't all the large Jags have inboard discs?

Absolutely. Some would also have you believe incorrect wheel nut torque leads to warped discs. And probably world poverty.

They're about the least stressed bolts on a car relative to their size.

Wow wheelnuts are obviously much more expensive nowadays

Don't most commercials have left hand threads on the left hand wheels?

"struth

apparent

lbs

socket

seen

necking

car)

c/sk

have

sure,

studs,

studs

nuts

Are you suggesting that I should have replaced them. If you are, I'd be interested in the reasoning behind that conclusion. If I'd had any doubts as to the safety of retapping the nuts, I would certainly have replaced them Ive no idea what they cost, but replacing wheelnuts just because they are tight is, IMO a complete waste of time and money, if that is the only fault, and you have a suitable tap, as I did. Mike.

Yep, you can set any decent gun to left hand mode. Probably not a failure mode down qwikfit though. (Their exhaust warrantys pretty good though, they don't understand about worn engine mounts :-) )

Fair enough, the CP & the Ingerssol Rand I've got both use an integrated torque (inaccurate, I do agree) & direction knob, you rotate it to set the torque in the directtion you want on one side which goes 1234 over 180deg & max over the other 180, on the other side the torque settings are offset by

180 degs so when you reverse it you get full torque. Not foolproof but very handy when you're doing a lot of similar bolts.

Well if you've distorted the thread in an alloy steel nut & then recut it it's weaker. It's listed as a do not do in any aircraft maintenance manual & any of the workshop manuals I've got to hand.

because

if

did.

then recut it

I would dispute that. For a start the steel used for most wheelnuts is nothing particularly special. Little tougher than plain MS, and quite malleable. For another, the length of thread is such that even losing a thread or two completely, would make little difference to it's overall strength. The tight area was merely the first thread or two, where the tapered portion had in effect been spun to a slightly smaller diameter through overtightening.. Reducing the diameter in this way, far from weakening the thread is more likely to strengthen it, or at least make that area slightly harder. The tap was run in from the undamaged end of the thread. All it did was take a few thou off the first thread or two where it had closed in at the tapered end.

That I can understand, having made components for the aircraft industry, but you can't apply similar stds to cars. If you did, most cars would not be allowed on the road, and new prices would go through the roof. I am not saying that what I did was the perfect solution, but as far as safety and strength is concerned, any difference in strength to a new nut would be negligible. Certainly not enough to warrant replacing them.

I can't recall re-tapping a nut ever even being mentioned in any of the w/s manuals I've seen over the years. Only that certain nuts and bolts cannot be reused, and should be replaced as a matter of course. Mike.

Dave Plowman mumbled:

Many, but not all.

Some even have lefthand threads on lefthand wheels -- figure that one out

Fair enough although that does still reduce your fatigue life a long way. & I'd go with the teory that the average car has massively over engineered wheel nuts anyway.

Well to quote the LR90 manual as it's next to me. Damaged threads must always be discarded.I was mainly thinking it hardly seems worth it compared with the negligible cost of the new ones but you do have to allow for the aquisition cost as well

smaller

this

strengthen

a long way.

Persistant aren't you. :-) Lets just say we agree to differ. My nearest Mitsubishi dealer is at least 10 miles away. It was a saturday afternoon, which would mean leaving it until monday. With a safe, hassle free, solution to hand, I opted to retap them. Mike.

And that's a perfectly fine solution on car wheel nuts. I had a set of bastard tight ones on a friend's Volvo the other week but we had a scrapper to change some bits from to get his through the MOT so I put all that car's nuts on his and vice versa and didn't need to go and find a tap. No one working on anything short of the space shuttle would worry about running a tap through a tight nut to clean it up properly if it looked ok in all other respects. What that does to fatigue life is three fifth's of sod all. We can't all afford to be that fussy.

Dave Baker - Puma Race Engines

"How's life Norm?" "Not for the squeamish, Coach" (Cheers, 1982)