Wheel fell off my car

[NW-Bound]

Rereading your post, I saw that they had problems removing the wheel. So, it is most likely that the lug nuts were overtightened before. Wheel studs that are overstressed like this should be replaced. The threads were stressed and later sheared off due to metal fatigue.

 

[REWahoo]

Amazing that you would lose 3 of 8 nuts. What are the chances of that?

Even more amazing to me was the fact two of the studs (at the 4 and 8 o'clock positions) had rusty surfaces indicating they had been cracked or broken for some time. Was this due to a defect in manufacturing? The truck was less than 6 months old and had only 9,000 miles on it at the time.

GM initially refused to take responsibility for the problem but I appealed to the district manager using this and other photos. I "suggested" to him the loss of the wheel was due to these two broken studs and was successful in getting a check for the $2K it cost to replace the hub, wheel and tire.

 

[Christine]

Rereading your post, I saw that they had problems removing the wheel. So, it is most likely that the lug nuts were overtightened before. Wheel studs that are overstressed like this should be replaced. The threads were stressed and later sheared off due to metal fatigue.

Good point - thank you!

 

[JoeWras]

Good point - thank you!

That's what I'm thinking.

This happens too often! I was behind a car that lost a wheel at 60 mph. I couldn't believe it! In shock, I watched it all unfold in slow motion. The car gently pulled over: good driving, no snap actions. The wheel kept going. It went into the median, jumped the guardrail and then split the oncoming traffic before going off the other side and into the woods. Whew! That could have been a very nasty situation.

 

[Walt34]

I got the lesson on the kinetic energy of a rolling tire when I was working at a gas station in 1967. Sunday or Saturday morning so traffic was very light, we heard a medium-sized truck coming, very noisy due to (we later figured out) the loose wheel that was about to come off. Right before us, the right front wheel comes off, rolling ~40 mph, and hit the side of a parked car, putting a huge dent in the car. It bounced around for a while longer, don't recall that it did any more damage, but I remember telling myself that if I ever saw a rolling tire, don't even think about getting in it's way to try stopping it.

 

[SteveNU]

Yes, lonng before one gets down to the last nut coming off, the wobbling wheel would cause the studs to shear off, like in REWahoo's photo.



It's perfectly OK to use an impact wrench (compressed-air-driven drill-looking thing) to loosen the nuts. Any mechanic who uses it to tighten any nut, not just wheel lug nuts, should be shot immediately on the spot. As you have no control of the torque, you would either overtighten, or make it too loose. A torque wrench that measures the exact torque applied by hand is a MUST.

The long rod you saw is called a "breaker bar". It is used to apply more torque if one needs to remove an supertight nut by hand.

Lots of shops use torque stix which are better than nothing. Too many just crank em down with their impact guns though.

Last time I got tires on my truck they had to use a six foot breaker bar to get some of the lugnuts off

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