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

I really don't to experience the number of punctures being talked about here. 1 in 20 years is quite enough.

Reply to
Peter Hill
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With respect to repairing punctures, the relevant part of the conversation is HOW to properly repair them.

There is only one proper way, which is to remove the carcass off the wheel, simply because the only way to know if there's damage to the inside is to look.

If you've ever seen the handfuls of fluffy black shavings that indicate a tire was driven on while very low in pressure, you'll know what I'm talking about, since a tire can easily have the belts visible inside, will look perfectly fine from the outside.

Luckily it's easy to dismount, remount, and statically balance (and dynamically test) a tire yourself, where it takes about the same amount of time as it takes a tire shop to do, only you don't have to drive to the tire shop on the flat tire (or mount the spare), and you get the satisfaction both of doing it yourself, and knowing you did it right.

Reply to
ultred ragnusen

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!

Reply to
ultred ragnusen

In the lack of any firm plans for the way forward after Brexit, just what do you expect?

We have had May promising Nissan they won't suffer financially after we leave. So taxpayer's money to subsidise car production? Seems only yesterday Boeing were objecting to what they thought was that.

Very worrying that not only do those countries apparently have human beings far more suited to pick fruit etc than the English, but also have better skills for car building too? Perhaps we should simply give up now...

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

You are joking! I've seen on many occasions how much effort goes into removing/replacing a tyre from/on the rim using the specialised tyre fitting equipment. There is also the 15/30 minutes for blowing up a completely flat tyre with one of those little 12V compressors that fit into the cigarette lighter socket.

I can just see all those inexperienced people breaking/chipping their alloy rims using breaker bars.

For the money I pay to get a puncture repaired (and dynamically balanced) by a tyre shop it's not worth the effort to even consider Do-it-Yourself. Without researching prices, I'll bet here in the UK the cost of obtaining one or two proper tyre repair patches would actually be close to the cost of using someone who does it for a living.

Reply to
alan_m

Henry Ford established over 100 years ago that you don't have to have much skill to assemble a car. To be competitive it just needs to be cheaper either by having cheaper labour cost and/or offsetting a lot of the spend on new factories and equipment with generous "regional grants" that will be given to deprived eastern EU countries (and/or to bale out many of the financial basket cases in southern Europe).

If you don't think car assembly jobs are not going to migrate ask someone from the USA what happened to Detroit.

Reply to
alan_m

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

Reply to
alan_m

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.

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

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.

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

And Trump apparently has conned many into voting for him by saying he'll get those jobs back. In exactly the same way as Brexiteers have conned the poor in the UK into thinking the EU is the cause of their woes.

However, comparing car production in the heyday of Detroit and now is a nonsense. Globilasation has changed the way components are sourced.

But then I do realise most Brexiteers base their hopes on when Britain ruled the waves. Rather than the world today.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Or was it the population just got fed up with the corrupt political class and wanted something different, good or bad?

You have no idea why most people who voted to leave did so.

I predict that staying in the EU or leaving will have exactly the same result with regards car assembly - it will migrate towards the poorer Eastern European countries in much the same way as many other industries have disappeared from the UK during the 40 years of EEC/EU membership.

Ask French and German car workers why their jobs are at risk, and both these countries are not leaving the EU.

Reply to
alan_m

My guess is that eventually, the factory jobs will come back to these United States. That's going to be good and bad news. Who the heck aspires to have a factory job? That's like wanting to grow up to be a coal miner.

Reply to
dsi1

"> wrote:"

Who wrote? Who are you talking to? Learn basic computer skills.

Reply to
James Wilkinson Sword

There is more to making cars - especially above budget level - than just finding the cheapest place to do it.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

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.).

Reply to
ultred ragnusen

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

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

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

Reply to
ultred ragnusen

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.

Reply to
alan_m

I think you need to rethink your underlying belief system, because what you fear is not at all what you should be fearing (IMHO).

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Hear me out, as I'm not chastising you for having a wholly misguided incorrect fundamental belief system, but do recognize I'm not at all joking that it takes about the same amount of time to change a tire at home (e.g., to fix a flat or to mount and balance new tires) as it takes for you to take it to the shop.

But time isn't why you do any work at home anyway, as time (or money) isn't the reason you do work at home - you do it at home because you enjoy it, or, because you want it done right.

Speaking only of time though, I admit the first time you mount and balance a tire at home, it takes forever though, particularly because you have to learn the hard way how critically important a "drop center" is, to the tire mounting process.

Once you figure out that the bead doesn't "stretch", you'll remember your lesson about that critically important "drop center" offset from center in the wheel rim.

After you figure out the concept of a drop center, you also have to learn the hard way, on the first and second tires, that the Harbor Freight tools have some limitations, which you work around.

  1. You're crazy if you don't buy the separate bead breaker
  2. The mounter's bead-breaker attachment bends on SUV tires
  3. You need a wooden board to extend the range of the bead breaker for SUVs
  4. A 6-inch vise grip is critical to prevent mounting bar slippage
  5. Liquid dish detergent (blue or green) is your friend.
  6. Don't believe the claims you need a special valve stem removal tool
  7. Did I mention that you're doomed until you recognize the drop center?

The only tools you need to change tires efficiently at home, in about the same amount of time it takes the shop to do it, are these: A. A decent compressor & fittings (which you already have most likely) B. A shrader-valve removal screwdriver C. A six-inch vise grip, one 2 or 3 foot tire iron, & dish detergent D. HF bead breaker tool (plus a two-foot board to extend its base) E. HF tire mounting tool (temporarily or permanently bolted to the ground) F. HF static balance tool & weights (sitting on a flat spot on the ground) G. About ten minutes per tire (depending on your experience level)

You fundamentally don't seem to understand that mounting tires at home is even more gentle than it is at the tire shop!

In fact, I have stock BBS rims on my bimmer, where the worst that happens is that a bit of the red paint from the tire iron transfers to the edge of the rim.

If you actually think that mounting a tire at home is in any way more damaging to a wheel than what they do at the shop, you really (really really really) need to rethink the entire underpinning of your fundamental belief system.

If you talk about money in any other manner other than the amount saved to offset the cost of the tools, then you're thinking about DIY differently than I do.

To me, DIY is about the satisfaction of learning & doing the job right.

If all you care about is money, then you'd pay someone else to clean your toilet, do your dishes, bake your bread, mow your lawn, sharpen your chainsaw, sweep the driveway, pick up litter on the sidewalk, tend to the roses, trim the trees, clean the gutters, change your oil, etc.

Saving money isn't why you do DIY, in that almost all DIY jobs are free in the end in terms of tool cost and material cost, in that it would almost always cost more to have someone else do (all those things above) than it would for you do to them.

You decide WHAT you do based on what you LIKE to do, where if you like baking bread, then you bake bread making it exactly the way you want it made, using exactly the ingredients you want to use. If you don't like baking bread, then you buy whatever you can get at the store, even if it's filled with ingredients you might not want to know you're ingesting.

I happen to like three things about changing & balancing tires: a. I like LEARNING all about what it takes, and, b. I like DOING the job any time I want to, and, c. I like the CONVENIENCE of changing tires in my pajamas.

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You don't DIY to save money - you DIY to have the satisfaction of doing the job yourself and knowing that the job is done right.

If saving money was actually your goal, you'd DIY everything, since almost nothing is worth paying someone else to do at the current shop rates where I live (Silicon Valley, ~$100/hour minimum, ~$200/hour dealer, $150/hour is a reasonable average).

Saving money isn't why you DIY.

Almost all DIY jobs are free in the end anyway, as you must be aware, where the tools pay for themselves over time, where changing tires at home is no different.

The only thing that changes the break-even period is your calculation of how many tires you change, and the amount of tools you already have (e.g., most of us have a compressor already).

Out here, the average for a tire to be mounted and dynamically balanced is as high as $50 per tire but it's often around $20 per tire, so let's use that round number (but use whatever number you want because the tools will always end up being free in the end anyway).

The three HF tools you need cost about $150, so to have even numbers, let's add another $50 for incidentals like the tire iron & the weights and the schrader valve screwdriver.

How many tires do you have to change to break even at those numbers?

$200 divided by 20 bucks per tire is 10 tires, right?

You can use any numbers you like, but they all will end up being around a dozen tires for the tools to break even and be free, and to start paying for themselves.

Say you're 40 years old, and you have a wife and two teens, all of whom have a car in the driveway (in the USA anyway). How many tires is that?

4 cars times 4 tires per car (let's ignore the spare) is 16 tires in the driveway.

If you change them just once, the tools are already well into the zone of paying for themselves.

Even if you have only two cars (mom & pop), the tool expense will break even in a couple of years.

There are storage costs. of course, but luckily no maintenance costs to the tools. As for storage, since I'm in the Silicon Valley where there is no snow, I just leave the tools outside with all my shovels and rakes and chocks and jack stands and ramps, etc., but if you store them inside, then you need to have a shed or an area in the garage to fit tools.

But these tools are no bigger than any of your other tools (e.g., drill press, table saw, belt sander, etc.) which you store all the time also.

In summary, you DIY because you ENJOY doing the job right, not because you want to save money, where you'd be hard pressed to find any repair on a vehicle that you don't save money if you do it yourself.

Can you even name a /single/ common maintenance task on a vehicle that a DIY doesn't save you money on over the cost for the tools?

Reply to
ultred ragnusen

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.

Reply to
rbowman

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.

Reply to
rbowman

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