This happened to me once, and the wheel brace snapped (using a pipe) and the and still the nuts didn't move. Fortunately, at home and not on the side of the road.

Now I always insist on hand tighten and I watch them do it.

So how did you finally get it off?

Rattle gun.

On my Ford F250 8 lug wheels, I generally use my 1/2" drive ratchet with a 3' steel pipe to break the lugnuts loose. On every single one of them, they make a "cracking" noise that makes you think that you just broke the stud......it's rather un-nerving.

This dude must have had a bad experience somewhere!

http://www.eric5150.com/pics/cheater.jpg

The Monday morning after I got my 911 I drove it to work to show my co-workers. At lunch I noticed I had a slow leak in a rear tire. There was a local family owned tire shop just around the corner so i just aired the tire up and took it over there. I watched as they used the side jack plate to jack up that side of the car and removed the wheel, removed the tire to patch the hole from the inside remount the tire and used a torque wrench to tighten the lug nuts. And they did all of that for no charge, as is their policy. I was blow away. I wrote a nice analog thank you letter to them and mailed it. They sent me a package in return and in it was a nice jacket with their corporate logo on it. I almost wrote another letter but I was afraid they would send a set of tires. ;)

I was very saddened when the family that owned the company accepted a buyout from a major tire chain.

this kind of stuff really pi$$es me off. there is no since in them cranking lug nuts that tight. and the bad thing is a "Tire Guy" did it. - he went to tire college :)
I hate morons

Complete BS. What happens when the lugs shear from excessive torque?

Unsafe.

Rjp

How tight can you go on a 911 before the alloy lug nuts strip?

Not very would be my guess. I've seen loose/broken threads in mine when I took them off and that was reason enough to replace them.

I helped out a kid with a mercedes that used his body weight to tighten his wheels down-

he hit a curb and the impact broke the lugs....Wheel wound up in the middle of the street. Fractured all around.

A week after the Toyota dealer rotated the wife's tires, I found two lug nuts spinning loosely and one missing. On the left front wheel. To their credit, the service manager did freak out when I brought the car back in. He personally loosened every lug nut and tightened them with a torque wrench.

Why is the wheel jacked up off the ground?. Is he testing his parking brake, trying to strip his parking pawl, or examining the stability of his jack stands?

Those lug nuts wouldn't be reverse threaded, would they? That was my first thought when you said you could not get them off.

What happens when these bolts are over torqued?Two concepts are important to understanding how a bolt works. They are Elastic Deformation and Yield Point. Elastic Deformation is metal's or, in this case, a bolt's ability to stretch and spring back to its original shape. Yield Point is where the bolt has been stretched past its elastic limit and can no longer spring back to its original shape. This stretching of a bolt and its pulling back creates Clamp Load. If, however, a bolt is over-torqued, and stretches past its Yield Point it can no longer maintain the Clamp Load.

So a loose wheel can be the result of an over torqued bolt. It happened to my moms car. A wheel vibration was the result of over torqued bolts. You could actually see that the bolts had stretched. Thank you Pep Boys for teaching my mom this lesson.

agreed. however the regular mechanic only has the torque value to rely on..and that is a moving target. someone in the back office did the math and correlated a torque to a required tension load. for instance, i know a guy that puts on a lot of anti seize on his lugs..that throws torque values out the window since things got much slicker.

The lug nut torque discussion came up in Tech a few years ago. What little bit I recall from that was that the threads have to be clean and dry. I like to use a bit of anti-seize on the threads despite this conventional thinking, and still go to 95~98 pounds per foot. I do clean the threads with a brass brush prior to installation. Porsche says to not use anti seize on the bolt cap or the ball. They like the mating surfaces to be dry, in other words.

If the bolts are overtorqued, then not only can the bolts or studs be damaged, but the wheel and hub may be distorted as well, causing a permanent wheel vibration.

With a diesel, it is real common for a filter to jell up at the most inopportune time .
Typically with a cold snap and the engine goes putt put ,,,no putt til you change the filter.
Its a nasty enough job to do beside the road if you can get at the filter...I can not imagine having to remove a wheel for this operation.
That would PISS ME OFF
Move the filter NOW !

That might be true if the previous filter was installed by a competent shop but the filter was replaced by Pep Boys and the same guy that did the lug nuts must have installed the filter ! :mad: Even with a strap wrench I can't get it to budge. I'm sensing a theme here...........

Okay- Everyone come clean! How many of you have jacked a car up only to remember you DIDN'T loosen the lug nuts before doing so... (multiple times....):D

If they get put on too tight, they shear at the top of the ball when you take them off.

Then you have to drill off the ball with a 3/4 inch hole saw. The local high end mechanics did this to my 928 when I had them mount new tires. It was the last time they ever touched one of my cars. The guy is a friend of mine too, and I once saved him 10,000 dollars framing a mega addition on his house and roofing it. Now I hear I am a bad customer...

Use an impact to get them off, if you want minimal damage. If yours won't do it, get a proper one.