On Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:34:26 -0500, Jules
wrote:

On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:31:58 -0400, mm wrote:
So does Ferrari provide owners with the appropriate torque wrench, right
there with the jack and spare tire?
The Ferrari came with a lead hammer to wallop the nut into place. That was
standard on more expensive sports cars at the time. I had them on my
MG-B in the 1960s.

This is because the cars were made for racing, and this makes pitstops
go faster, right?

Well, once upon a time pretty much everything had a single spin-on nut, I
suppose - presumably a hang-over from the [horse and] cart days of old.
Cars still have a single nut holding the wheel hub onto the axle, of
course, but at some point in time people started separating the wheel/tire
from the hub and using several nuts (or bolts) to hold the two together.

Not sure of the logic of retaining the single spin-on nut for high-end
sports cars - it might have just been a stylistic* thing more than
anything (lose a single spin-on nut and you're in trouble - plus having

Do you remember spinner hubcaps (back when wheel covers were still
called hubcaps)? They looked like a single spin-on nut, but were only
decorative. Underneath was the standard 5-bolt steel wheel.

one big nut versus several smaller ones spread over a wider area is
presumably weaker)

* particularly for wire wheels - the wheel center needs to be bigger to
accomodate several studs / bolts rather than a single large spin-on.

It's definitely very hard to have five lug nuts 3 or 4 inches from the
center when you have wire wheels.

I got into the habit of just taking wheels into tire places rather than
the whole car, too, because I found they had a habit of messing up alloy
wheels or over-torquing the nuts and damaging the threads :-( Better to
haul 'em in using another vehicle and put them back on the car at
home...

That's a good idea. I need a second car, or a wife with a car.

It was particularly annoying for any vehicle where they couldn't look up
the torque figures in their book - they had a habit of over-torquing
things with the air wrench "just to be safe" and chewing up the alloys.

Plus of course they can't try and scam you with a bunch of invented
urgent brake and exhaust work if you just show up with wheels... :-)

Can't they try to sell you the rest of the car?

cheers

Jules