Don't be me...

[Ivan_B]

I always do a round-about with a torque wrench. When the car is on the ground, that is! With the OEM hubcaps, it is really easy - if the hubcap is on, the wheel is done.

[Sniper]

4 hours ago, desoto1939 said:

So we all have had some issues with not tightening the lug bolts. 

 

Same here, I recently helped my son flush his brakes and when we were done I torqued all the lug bolts then handed him the wrench and told him to do the same.  He asked me why since I had just done them and I told him, sometimes you miss one and you don't want your rims coming off.

[Los_Control]

Couple weeks ago I had all 4 tires off my truck .... first time I drove it again was a 150 mile round trip drive.

 

I use a air powered impact gun .... 120 psi at the compressor, probably 95 psi at the end of 50' of hose? ..... I need to start using the brand new torque wrench I got recently to check them.

 

Anyways I took off on the trip and I just felt bad about not checking the wheels again .... I made it about 30 miles then found a place to pull over then go around and check them.

They were fine! My mind would just not let me go further without pulling over and checking them after they had been disturbed previously.

 

[Booger]

OMG it's like Twilight Zone

(You remember, right?) Stuff happens. As pretty as hub caps are they can hide danger. Hand it to Chrysler at least they did opposite threads on wheel bolts. 85 -90 ft lbs please

 

[Ivan_B]

3 hours ago, Los_Control said:

They were fine! My mind would just not let me go further without pulling over and checking them after they had been disturbed previously.

That is called an obsessive-compulsive situation, happens all the time 🤣

 

3 hours ago, Booger said:

85 -90 ft lbs please

Are you sure that this would not deform the rim? Sounds a bit too high. Last time I researched this, I could not find the OEM specs, but the collective consensus was somewhere about 60-65 🤔

[Sniper]

Bolts need a specific amount of torque to properly fasten, that amount hasn't changed and the rim is designed to handle it.

 

For a grade 8, 1/2-20 bolt that number is 90 ft/lbs.  Always has been, always will be.

 

 

[Los_Control]

I just did a quick google search to verify it .... A chebby silverado ...... 1988-90 90 ft lbs 1991-95 120 ft lbs ...

What surprises me is 2018 & up is 140 ft lbs?

 

I'm just old school, back in the days when I worked in tire shops or later ran a service truck .... the impact gun was the norm.

Later when foreign cars and cars generally were smaller, they started to torque them because they were warping the small brake rotors with too much torque.

That really cut into the profit and made the shop look bad, if they had to replace your brakes for free because they over tightened the wheels.

 

I'm a firm believer in using a torque wrench on them ..... I just did not have a decent one. I did buy one for a job I was expecting to do last month .... now I can.

What worries me about my older impact wrench, it gets sluggish from old dirty oil in it. I use WD40 in it to clean the old oil out and it really puts the zip back into the gun and returns the power .... then I add fresh oil to it. I just do not know what torque it is giving me, possible it is not the 95 lbs needed.

[Dave72dt]

25 minutes ago, Los_Control said:

I just did a quick google search to verify it .... A chebby silverado ...... 1988-90 90 ft lbs 1991-95 120 ft lbs ...

What surprises me is 2018 & up is 140 ft lbs?

 

Larger diameter and alloy wheels.  Just about everything these days comes with larger diameter or alloy wheels.

[Ivan_B]

1 hour ago, Sniper said:

. . .and the rim is designed to handle it.

Technically, that's true. Although, there are known cases where the rim got deformed with the OEM specs, on some cars... Engineers are humans too, they do make mistakes

 

I tightened my bolts to 65 and marked them with paint, because I was also concerned about the proper torque. A few month has passed, the bolts have not moved a bit, just checked the marks.

 

 

[Sniper]

Those Silverados use M14-1.50 thread studs, that's larger than 1/2-20.  And the 90 mentioned was a minimum spec, there are also maximum specs.

 

As for using an impact, great, till you are the sad sack on the side of the road trying to change a flat.

[OUTFXD]

I remember doing the exact same thing (finger tightening lug nuts) on my first car.  Got out of the driveway and the tail gave a little wiggle,  which I thought was odd.  made it another 300 yards and the rear gunner side of the car suddenly dropped. I softly applied the breaks while looking over my shoulder twords the trouble area to see my right rear tire bounce passed me,  over q guardrail  and into a blackberry bush. 

 

After an adventure extracting the tire.   I could find nothing broken and realized I had not tightened the lug nuts.  I ended up buying a new set of lug nuts to replace the ones that fell off.

 

So dont feel like you have a monopoly on dumb mistakes.  We all do it!

[Los_Control]

5 minutes ago, OUTFXD said:

So dont feel like you have a monopoly on dumb mistakes.  We all do it!

My turn was when I was a dumb 21 year old kid .... I was moving a 10' x 60' mobile home to a piece of property I leased .... It was sitting in a park for many years and had to dig it out to get wheels on it. .... plan was to tighten them while in the air, pull it out of the hole then tighten all lug bolts .... I forgot.

 

Driving down the freeway at 35-40 mph and watched the trailer tire pass me up, cross the medium and 3 lanes of oncoming traffic .... it was a adventure chasing it down.

 

I'm no longer a dumb 21 year old kid, I'm 62 this year 

[Booger]

Use the impact wrench to snug things up, then finish going round the clock with tor-kay wrench

[Sniper]

1 hour ago, OUTFXD said:

I softly applied the breaks

 

AHHHHHHHHH

 

lol

[Booger]

You can find a 10-150# 1/2" torque wrench for $45 at the orange store

[Los_Control]

2 hours ago, Sniper said:

Those Silverados use M14-1.50 thread studs, that's larger than 1/2-20.  And the 90 mentioned was a minimum spec, there are also maximum specs.

 

As for using an impact, great, till you are the sad sack on the side of the road trying to change a flat.

Are you kidding me? ..... Just pulling the wheels off my Dodge caravan .... had it in the air on jack stands, and 2 lug nuts I could not remove with my impact wrench.

I had to jack it up higher then set the wheel down on blocks and manually loosen them with a breaker bar and a cheater pipe  ..... feeling sorry for me yet?  

 

[Eneto-55]

1 hour ago, Los_Control said:

Are you kidding me? ..... Just pulling the wheels off my Dodge caravan .... had it in the air on jack stands, and 2 lug nuts I could not remove with my impact wrench.

I had to jack it up higher then set the wheel down on blocks and manually loosen them with a breaker bar and a cheater pipe  ..... feeling sorry for me yet?  

 

Bought a 2019 Dodge RAM Classic (4th Gen) last Fall.  Up here in the "Salt Belt" wheels are sometimes a bear to get off, even after the lugs are loosened.  After getting one off with a bunch of kicking, I had to do the "pop the P15 Drum loose" trick to get the other front one off.  (Loosened the lugs, and drove up the street, whipping the wheel back & forth.  Finally heard it pop.  Then I go to the back.  Seems I did the same for one of them, then tried the other. No way would it come loose.  Finally snugged the lugs back down and drove to my son-in-law's place, and we used his hydraulic ram to get the other loose.  (Or maybe we had to do that for both rear wheels?)  Anyway, so I slathered a bit of oil on the mating surfaces, and drove back home.  Couple of days later I was going to finish the job, cleaning the rust off of the inner wheel hub circle.  Kicked them, Beat on them with a mall for splitting fire wood.  No go.  Had to put the lugs back on loose, put it back on the ground, and go whip around in the store parking lot up the street.  I was ready to give up when I turned sharp enough on a slight hill that it popped loose again.  It'll be interesting to see if they will come off easy next time, or not.  (This PU has steel wheels - aluminum wheels are even worse for "bonding" to the steel hubs.)

 

I might catch some guff for this, but I don't use a torque wrench. I have one, and used to be able to feel just what so-and-so many foot pounds it like.  I'm not a big guy, nor am I a"muscle man", so they have to be so that I can get them off again.  (I don't have an impact, and wouldn't have on on the road with me anyway.)  I run them down snug, then work my way around and around a few times with a large X wrench, just a bit more on each, till it's to where I can just get them off with nothing but a 1/2" break-over.  The only time I've had a wheel come loose was when I had a tire shop swap some tires around for me.  And it was still well within the 50 miles they always talk about.  But I should put the torque wrench to them once, and see how tight I've been making them.

[Ivan_B]

Am I really the only person who is putting graphite/copper onto the lugs/bolts, hubs, spindles (and most of other hardware on the car) and never have any problems removing anything? 🙄

[Eneto-55]

17 minutes ago, Ivan_B said:

Am I really the only person who is putting graphite/copper onto the lugs/bolts, hubs, spindles (and most of other hardware on the car) and never have any problems removing anything? 🙄

I never had any issues with it either, just a bit of oil on the threads; that is, until I moved up here to Ohio, where the Rust Devil also lives.  But graphite sounds like something I should try instead of axle grease. 

[Ivan_B]

Axle grease/oil is also usually fine, unless you are dealing with hot things (plugs, O2 sensor, exhaust). Since I always have a tube/can for the aforementioned applications I also use it for everything else because I am consistent

[Dan Hiebert]

When I was working in far west Texas in the '90's, we had Ford Expeditions in our fleet (US Border Patrol), I forget what year model they were, but it was the fleet purchase for one year.  Among other issues we were having with them, the wheels tended to come off on the highway.  Seeing a USBP Expedition on the side of the road with a missing tire got to be a running joke with all the local law enforcement agencies.  Good thing social media didn't exist at the time, I'm sure we would have been the brunt of many memes.  Thankfully, to my knowledge, no one ever got hurt from it.  Anyway, USBP tried to fix the problem by mandating torquing to OE specs, I think it was 90 ft lbs., every 1000 miles.  That didn't work, so we gradually reduced the mileage to every 50 miles, and it was still a problem.  Ford ended up sending reps to several field locations, their solution to the problem was to torque the lug nuts to 130 ft lbs.  The wheel falling off problem went away, but we had to buy better lug wrenches than the factory ones for every single Expedition so the agents could get the wheels off when they got a flat, some of the "less robust" agents would still end up calling for help to get lug nuts off.   

[Ivan_B]

24 minutes ago, Dan Hiebert said:

Ford ended up sending reps to several field locations, their solution to the problem was to torque the lug nuts to 130 ft lbs. 

Apparently, the lug lock bracket, or even a simple thread lock, also did not exist at that time? 🤨

[Dan Hiebert]

We tried thread lock, didn't work.  Unknown about the other.  Kind of a matter of how much work should an agent put into changing a flat.  We were supposed to be LEOs, not mechanics, no one is hired for mechanical skills, although not having some basic mechanic skills could leave you in the desert by yourself for many hours.  And, yes, we did have a good number of agents that didn't know how to change a flat in the first place.  We had significantly fewer agents back then, five or six thousand nationwide, there's close to 19K now.  Where I was stationed then had 8 agents to cover 64 miles of the border over three shifts.  Back-up was often already an hour or two away.  I often gave up on back-up getting there in time and did stuff to effect seizures or arrests that would be considered insane nowadays, back then, everyone at the smaller stations did the same thing.  That extra few minutes to do more than tighten all the lug nuts if you happened to get a flat at the wrong time could make a huge difference.  I vaguely recall that it was finally figured out to be how the wheel studs were made, as in the composition of the metal, a cost cutting measure that didn't work.  They held up fine in civilian use, but we tended to be a bit rougher on vehicles.  I still find it humorous that when the Ford reps did ride-alongs to try and figure out what was going on, they were aghast that most of our work was off paved roads.  Those model Expeditions were apparently designed for 4x4 use only in poor road conditions.  

[Ivan_B]

2 hours ago, Dan Hiebert said:

We were supposed to be LEOs, not mechanics

Exactly. I am talking about Ford guys... Ride alongs? Off road use? Didn't they have them wheels tested for endurance on the "bounce/roll" machine? As a reputable automotive establishment, they must've done all that at the factory since at least the 40s if not early 😳

 

Also, Dan, you've got to tell us some western war stories about apprehending fugitives, etc. I bet that would be interesting for everyone 😃

Edited March 23 by Ivan_B

[kencombs]

Anti-seize compound on the hub/wheel centers and light coat on the wheel to hub meeting surface for me.   Some recommend on the threads too, and I've done that, but you need to modify the torque specs with such well lubed threads.   Might break a stud or bolt.

It lasts much better that oil, and is intended for that use.