unbelievable - 411 driven for first time in 9 years

[Kevin H]

Originally Posted by Geoff Dowdle

Kevin, the question you should ask yourself is "what is the rest of the
car like " ????????
Geoff

Geoff, I have no concerns about the rest of the work in terms of whether it has been done properly because he is such a perfectionist. I have seen much of the work along the way and documented it, although I must admit I didn't check the torque on every nut and bolt! He is at a loss as to how it could have happened and needless to say rather embarrassed.

One thing I should mention is that the old mild steel wheel nuts and collars have been nickel plated and polished (shown here), I was wondering if this could have affected them in some way, but I doubt it.

The wheels have been back on the car for a long time (years) but it hasn't moved, other than on and off the hoist in the workshop occasionaly. The other three wheels on the car were rock solid, so the only explanation is that they weren't tightened properly on the one wheel. My guess is that an assumption was made that they were all tightended a long time ago, possibly by someone else.

[412usa]

Kevin, What a shame after such a wait! I have found that Bristol wheel nuts
are threaded such that they are a very tight fit on the studs. This will
often confound air driven guns into thinking they are tight. However, the
strange thing is that if they were a tight fit on the threads, how did they
back themselves off by driving? Very strange. I have had a similar problem
with my Subaru after a garage swapped my car to snow tires but I stopped
before the wheels fell off. The lesson. Always use a torque wrench to
finally tighten wheel nuts.

Peter

[Hydroglen]

Perhaps the rims are not suited to the nuts or vice-versa. If the chamfer
in the nuts does not mesh correctly with the hole in the rim, they will
come loose.
I assume Devon is still in the bottom left part of the country next to
Cornwall? The equivalent of AA needs a new map.
Regards,
Dorien

[Kevin H]

On re-fitting the wheel we did notice that you can tighten all nuts by hand, wiggle the wheel a bit, then tighten them some more and you can do this several times, so they are quite a finicky fit. This suggests that if you lowered all of the car's weight onto the wheels before fully tightening the wheel nuts there is a chance that you would not be able to torque them up properly with a typical cross style wheel brace, even though they appear to be very tight.