ok, kinda crazy story...wondering if anyone else has seen this?

a couple months ago i was driving around minding my own business when i felt some friction in the passenger front wheel. i thought maybe i ran over something or had a flat so i pulled over and looked. everything was fine.
so i got back in my car and drove slowly down the road. its feeling worse now. (it's 5am by the way...dont ask) suddenly my steering wheel starts to shake so i slow down to almost a complete stop before my wheel fell COMPLETELY off and the weight of the car came down on top of it!!
somehow the studs were completely sheared right off! no signs of rust on them!

any ideas how this could have happened? i have my own theories, but interested in your input...

 

ummm thats weird lol

 

 

could be either 1 of 2 things
either when they tightened them they overtightened
or
someone forgot a couple of lugs, with 4 you can roll but with 3 (which is my guess) you lose the wheel

 

Stock wheels or After Market?

 

wow.. that's scary.. did u mess with the lug nuts or anything? take out your front wheel?? Shouldn't have done this...

Did u do any maintenance on the car that recquired the front wheel to be taken off??

I'm guessing maybe the lugnuts weren't tightened..

 

how tight do the lug nuts need to be, like how many lbs of torque???

 

damn, that definitely sucks!!....did anything get damaged as a result?

 

someone probably impacted your lugs on a stretched your studs

 

70lbs I believe, but I am not even too sure, I use a impact gun everytime, I just dont hit it more than once

 

80 lbs. , but i always do about 81-82 just to be absolutely sure.


to OP, that sucks dude, hope you get everything fixed.

 

0_0 pretty scary.

that happened to me years ago in my 1970 240z. i was on the freeway and my car started to shake really bad at 80mph, then all of a sudden my rear dipped down to the right and then smoothed out. thats when i saw my wheel 10 ft in the air in front of me, bouncing down the freeway, while cars were swerving to get around it. so i had to pull into the middle devider, while keeping an eye on my runaway wheel, to see where it ends up. the rear drum and A arm was completey grinded down 1/2 way i was just lucky i didnt cause a 10 car pile up i found my wheel about a 1/2 mile ahead in some bushes up a hill, near the side of the freeway.

anyways, didnt mean to hijack your thread. i just wanted to share a simular story, cause it could have been ALOT worse for you if you were going high speeds. my lug nuts sheared right off too and it was a tire shop to blame. i dont think they tighten the lugs enough, so at high speeds the shaking just yanked the wheel right off the drum.

did you get any work done to your car before hand??

 

were the holes for the studs all elongated?

 

good think you slowed down. that's really scary. keep us posted.

 

Sounds like sabotage

The only thing I could think of would be that the lugs were over tightened. OP, you said you had your own theories, what are they?

 

I bet he thinks that someone did it on purpose. That's the only thing I can think of that makes you say I'll reserve my thoughts on it. Sinister type shit!

Could be the husband or boyfriend of that hottie whose house you were creeping from at 5AM?? Or a jealous dude?

 

As the OP is saying, he felt the wheel fall off gradually, so it was a domino effect, one lug went bye bye, 2nd one went bye bye, and the pressure just stripped the other 3.

You lucky you weren't driving at high speed! Even if you overtorqued the lug nuts, as long as it was done in a star pattern they should hold, but I'm guessing you undertorqued a few, which caused the wheel to wobble, loosening other lug nuts.

If this really was a sabotage, I would kick someone's ass, bad... Otherwise I would of probably sued the manufacturer or the person performing work on your car, as this would of lead to a deadly result. I'm glad you are ok, I bet from now on you check your wheels every time you get in the car

 

Something similar happened to my brother's Jetta. In that case it was caused by a dragging brake caliper that caused to the disc to heat up and fail dramatically. The whole hat part of the rotor shattered and in the process tore the wheel bearing out of it's carrier.

The way it happened was eerily similar to 04accordcpe's tale. On the highway, the car started shaking for about 5 seconds. Then the back end dropped down and it smoothed out. Then we saw the rear tire passing us and decided to pull over. The car handled surprisingly well with 3 tires. The wheel ended up in a ditch almost a mile up the road because we were on a long gradual down grade. Luckily it was 3 in the morning and there were very few other cars.

 

Unbalanced wheel, missing lugs, not tightened right. Its happened to my integra once. My 18" Racing harts are still off of I20 lol. I think in my case it was due to the very poor roads against a low pro 18" rim. I was going about 85 mph. When I realized my wheel fell off, I braked and saw my wheel run into the bushes lol

 

Aluminum wheels 100
Steel wheels 80

 

I worked at Discount Tire Last summer. The torque specs for a TL are 90 ft lbs.

 

Same thing happened to me... on Hillside Ave in Queens with my previous car... the wheel ended up 2 blocks away... lol... it was due to overtightening the lugs by a Flat Fix spot...


I was going about 10 mph and the car slide on the lower ball joint for and 10 feet...

 

I guess this is a kind of common occurence. This happened to my friends integra after he took it into discount tire, but they paid to get the car fix.

out of curiousness, so this doesnt happen to me. When i change a flat and put on my spare and tighten the lug nuts, how tight am i suppose to have the nuts and how do i know how much torque im putting when im just using the provided spare tire tools?

 

I think the general rule of thumb is to snug up all nuts without really cranking on em then another 1/2 turn. Put the car down off the jack before the final tightening and always go in a star pattern.

 

80 lbs-ft

 

someone coulda tried to steal the rim/rims and got scared off leaving ur car on a lug or 2

 

wow and i thought this was a one in a billion freak occurance that happened to me. almost the same exact thing...

and im with you, the car did drive surprisingly well with just 3 tires. i dont think id want to find out what would happen if it was the front wheel

 

Probably how i totaled my 05 TL, and yes it was NBP. I will never know because i do not remember and was life flighted to the hospital.

 

same type of thing happened to me as well in a first gen altima beater. the passenger wheel was shaking as well, i thought it was a bubble in the tire. so i was driving to a friends house and then all of a sudden, bam! my car skids on the passenger rotor leaving gashes in the asphalt. then we just see my wheel go flying forward. me and my friends just looked at each other surprised, then just started cracking up. it was dangerous as hell yet hilarious.

 

Japspec964, lol, I mean sorry it happened, but I can only imagine watching one of your wheels leave the car, and roll by itself in front of you.

 

yea man im telling u it it was freaking hilarious!! good thing it was my beater though. id cry if it ever happened to my TL.

 

It's hard not laugh when something like that happens. I know I sure did.

This is kind of off topic but really funny so I'll tell it anyway. My redneck uncle was towing a huge tri-axle with a truck that was obviously too small for it. Driving along some road in Indiana when he looks out the window and notices his trailer now passing him 50 ft to the right through a corn field. It sheared a telephone pole clean off and veered off, leveling a small church. It somehow continued on until it was stopped by a tiny tree. The cops show up and before any one gets a chance to say anything, my cousin who was about 6 at the time says to the cop, "My daddy was going fast, fast, fast." And it was off to jail for my uncle.

Some years later that very same trailer (my uncle built it himself out of I-beams and railroad ties) would again go on a solo journey and take out 2 blocks worth of telephone poles in some small town in Indiana. That time he had to pay for all the poles and the utility workers time to replace them all.

And he still has the trailer.

 

haha, lol.

Maybe he has a grudge against the telephone poles? lol.

That's funny, when your trailer passes you by, I can only image the look on his face...

 

Somebody put your wheel on with an impact wrench and nothing to limit the torque applied to the nuts. If they weren't tightened enough, the studs would still be intact. Someone tightened them to the point of breaking, which they did when you were driving. The increasing noise/vibration probably happened as they snapped one at a time, each one adding to the tension on the others as it snapped.

Always insist that the technician HAND TORQUE the lugs to the correct spec. Too loose if bad, but too tight can even be worse. Some morons think that tighter is better, but that's not the case!

 

OK, my theory is that the dealership put my (aftermarket) wheels on either too loose (because they torqued them as if they were stock) or too tight. probably too tight like some of you guys said because the studs were torn off.

i DON'T think someone did it TO me only because there were locks on the rims. but some idiot may have tried stealing them and got all but the lock off and gave up, leaving the rest loose. not sure.

NO major damage was done to the car until the jackass from the tow company tried to lift it onto a flat bed with the wheel still under the car...the car moved but the wheel didn't and it crushed the fender and wheel well and part of the passenger door before he stopped pulling it. then he jacked the car up and removed the wheel and placed a plastic glide under the rotor and got it on the flat bed that way.

a cop witnessed all of this and i'm thinking i should file a claim against the tow company for negligence.

for the guys that had this happen: did you end up suing anyone? who paid for YOUR damage in the end?

 

i couldn't really see cuz it was dark and the car was towed right to the dealership. but all the studs were there and i still have them in my trunk with the lugnuts on them (they never came off the studs). so i think they were too TIGHT because i'm guessing that if they were too loose they would've come OFF right?

 

whoaa thats weirddd