thank you tire monkey !!! lug nut rant !
 

I have a 2001 GMC one ton dually 4 x 4 I call KONG :D . Last year I had a local Pep Boys install 6 new tires. Today I was going to replace the diesel fuel filter which is a screw on type similar to an oil filter and it is in the engine bay on the passenger side. The easiest way to replace it ( I'm told ) is to remove the passenger side front tire, remove the plastic inner fender liner and voila the fuel filter is right there. So step one is to loosen the lug nuts.......you gotta be kidding me how many foot pounds of torque did you guys install these nuts with ????!!!!! :mad: I cranked up my IR industrial compressor, set my impact for stun and the lug nuts laughed at me :o I could not get one friggen lug nut loose ! I then tried a breaker bar with my 220 pounds bouncing off it no dice. I guess I'll have to get a piece of pipe to go over the breaker bar to see if I can crack these loose. I know this is a big heavy truck designed to pull/haul a lot of weight but common sense says they don't have to be this damn tight !

I usually slide the handle from my floor jack over the end of the breaker.

Never, ever go to Pep Boys for any reason!!! Years ago, I moved to Houston from FL. I had no friends or family where I could go to work on my car. I had very limited tools and space. When things went wrong that I couldn't do, I took my car to Pep Boys thinking that if anything went wrong, I could at least call the corporate 1-800 and complain, and be made right. I learned eventually that the Pep Boys 1-800 was crap and the service was even worse. It varied from mildly, maliciously irritating to horribly and completely incompentent. (really, I think 98% of my problems were due to gross incompentence with very little "let's just screw him, he'll never know the difference") Fortunately, I did know the difference and didn't let them intentionally screw me, but I did bear the brunt of the incompetence.

Reminds me of the rant from Lethal Weapon 2

If you are looking for decent installers in your area, you may want to go to tirerack.com and check their list of installers. I think that their installers are more likely to be pretty good. I have used one and had good luck. I assume TireRack would remove them if they got complaints.

Sounds "painful"... A long time ago I was helping someone remove the lug nuts from an old Combi Van. Really old tires, lots of corrosion.
Long story short after spending most of the day failing (including bouncing on a breaker bar until it broke) he had to use a nut splitter to remove them.

I hope you have better luck.

On the Porsche I bring wheels in loose to preclude crap like this but it's not always possible with the daily driver.

So I brought my daily driver to C&R tire (a Tire Rack recommended installer) and had my breaker bar with me in the trunk. As soon as they finished installing the new tires I pulled out my breaker bar from the trunk and tried to break the nuts loose. Prior to starting the work I said to the guy at the desk: "Please make a note on the paperwork and do not over torque the lug nuts". He indeed wrote it down.

The breaker bar wouldn't budge. I was pissed. I walked in and got the manager whom I spoke with earlier, handed him my breaker bar and asked him to get any of the nuts loose. He couldn't. "How am I supposed to get this off on the side of the highway with a flat?" I asked - pissed.

He apologized and said they do it as habit because they don't wheels coming off on the road...

I wish I the equipment at home to do tires.

Why don't they use torque sticks? They have no liability if the wheel comes off, as long as they can certify that they used the right stick.
My old Mercedes dealer had a great service manager. He had the crew torque stick the wheels on at a torque lower than spec. the use a hand torque wrench to tighten them.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1463959673.jpg

What a load of crap.

"they do it as a habit because they are lazy and it's quicker and easier"

Here ^, fixed it for him.

These looks cool. I guess they only twist so far before yielding. Is it possible to break them?

Local Discount Tire always does the final tightening manually with a torque wrench.
Even though I bring the car's wheels & tires to them in the back of my truck, I thank them every time for doing it properly.

I let them do the truck- The invoice lists the torque setting they used.

I leave the wheel on, and just remove the fender liner .

They did the same thing to me and I ended up shearing the lug nuts on my wife's Previa. Took it back and they were most apologetic and comp'd me an oil change. You really should never go there.

All tire places I've ever gone to have torque sticks.
I specifically ask them to use them,

I have a 5-foot piece of galvanized fence-post that works wonders!

Randy

and you should take a moment to thank GMC for this piece of inconsiderate prick engineering.

Last year, I had a local tire store mount my snow tires on a spare set of rims.
They offered to switch the rims onto my car for free (I guess it was already built into the price- most people don't walk in with loose rims, but a nice gesture!!!!;))
They switched them out, and went back with torque wrenches after for final adjustment.
I asked them what they torqued it too.

FWIW- Volvo's- 81ft/lb torque.
Which I remember since I commute on interstate 81 everyday.

Would I let any of them touch the aluminium lug nuts on the p-car? F@#$ no!!!!- Although the indie shop nearby has the right socket... :)

This reminds me of why I won't use Toyota's dealerships to wipe my ass let alone touch my cars. Made the mistake of taking the wife's Highlander in for service since it was free (first 2 years). Went to do an oil change since they will only do it every 10k free, and her car has a cartridge instead of the spin on filter. I have the correct wrench and it took both feet against the wall with a breaker bar and extension and all my 250+ lbs pulling on it to get that thing off.

Know what TOYOTA recommends for the oil filter cartridge torque??? Just past hand tight!

No need to remove anything to replace the fuel filter on a duramax up to 2007. Can be easily replaced in 2-3 minutes from under the hood including the time needed to swap the water in fuel sensor and prime the filter.

Wait just a minute, people. SM just gave me an idea when he mentioned the floor jack.

Think about it.

Tick


Tock


Tick


Tock


Got it yet?


Slide a cheater bar over your lug wrench. Position the wrench on the lug so that the bar is in the 4:00 position.

Got it now?

Put the floor jack under the end of the cheater bar and apply 2 tons of pressure.

:D

It'll either break off the lug or loosen it, right?

Way to think like an engineer Patrick! ;)

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.