cyclopticgaze
Good Help is Hard to Find
Jan 08, 2008
I got some new tires recently, so of course I had to go to a tire place to have them mounted onto my wheels and balanced. It's hard to find places that will do good car work, and I'm still searching up here in New England. Scratch one more place off the list of possibilities. They did a good enough job mounting the tires, but they treated me like I'm some idiot. On top of that, the dumbasses proved themselves the idiots because they over-torqued the lug nuts. They torqued them so hard that when I went to put the snow tires on my car, I couldn't crack the lug nuts loose. Here was my solution:
Thanks, jerk-offs. And what was I supposed to do on the side of the road if I had a flat? Maybe they over-torque them for liability reasons, but I say this is dangerous, too.
This worked well enough, but even with a good 36" of leverage, it took a lot of force to budge the lug nuts. Just as I was thanking my lucky stars that I didn't crack the lug posts, I hit a problem. These wheels have some special lug nuts that require a key. Well, I put so much torque on the key that this happened:
Done been broke.
The only good news is that it broke on the LAST lug nut I was loosening. Still, that meant I couldn't get the last wheel off, so right now I'm driving around on 3 snow tires and one all-season until the new key I ordered arrives. $15 so I can remove one lug nut. And there's no way in hell I'm putting those lug nuts back on. I'm sticking with the plain-old ones that any wrench can remove. I'm not terribly worried about anyone stealing my wheels in Woodstock, CT. I don't see too many cars up on blocks around here.