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

possibly because they locate in the tool that puts on all the wheel nuts at the same time.

no because some force will just be twisting the bar, Imagine a bar a mile long, you twist one end with a known force, the other end would not move.

better to leave the tyres alone, rotating the position of tyres went out of fashion about 60 years ago.

99.99% of car owners don't own a torque wrench. The short green wrench is the cheapest that can be made (and to fit in with jacking tool kit) to get someone out of trouble when they have to change of tyre in an emergency. In many cases when the tyre has be installed from factory or by a the retailer using (air) powered tools most people would find it very difficult to undo the wheel nuts with that wrench. Much better to discard it and get something with a longer handle

or

But don't most people jump on it using their whole body weight ? :)

or just clamp the wrench's drive in the vise. Measure from axis, add weight. This is simple arithmetic not rocket science.

My guess is that the lug nutz are marked that way to indicate the grade of the fastener in this critical application.

OK - like a circlip type clip to retain the nut in the tool?

That would make sense.

I never rotate any tyres What's the point? When one wears out I replace it.

Most sensible answer yet.

I guess people used to be bored before TV was invented.

Yes, in the educated world this type of nonsense has mainly disappeared but I suspect the original poster lives in the USA where frequent tyre rotation and 6K oil changes are promoted in order to keep the car service industry alive - or else they have poorer quality tyres and oil.

The main thing is to have all nuts tightened the same. With in some limits, the actual torque is not all that important as long as the wheel does not come off,or you strip or break the bolt.

That makes too much sense for Usenet! :)

I guess there are two faults with a 20" extension bar that a 2" extenstion bar wouldh't have then.

1. Some of the measured torque is wasted in twisting the bar, and,
2. Any extension bar not at 90 degrees to the nut also changes the torque.

Both effects are probably slight - but perhaps measurable?

That "teloscopic torque wrench" was a new tool to my eyes! (Too bad it doesn't take a socket because it's 17/19 & while I need 21mm).

It must be a clever internal mechanism that calculates the torque correctly when you can change the distance along the lever!

Truth be told, I've used my appreciable body weight for /removing/ lug bolts ... but never for tightening them.

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

4-point extension bar location.

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

1/4", 3/8", and 1/2" sizes we use in America? Or do the Europeans use a metric sized drive square?

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??????