It was the fall of 1976, my first semester at UMass Amherst. I’d owned the ’73 Triumph GT-6 for several months. I was driving back from Lexington, Massachusetts, to Amherst at 2:00 a.m., because that’s what you did when you were young, stupid, and fearless.
I was on Route 2 in Concord when I began hearing a metallic rumble that grew rapidly and alarmingly louder. I stopped. I had no flashlight and no tools, because—well, young and stupid, right? All my years of hard lessons still lay ahead of me.
I called my friend Tim Hornig, waking up his mother at that ungodly hour. To his enormous credit, Tim came and rescued me, and I incurred one of those debts you never quite pay. The next day, Tim, my friend Dave Gelineau (hack mechanic par excellence) and I returned to the car. Mercifully, it was still there in the breakdown lane.
Dave took one look at the car from behind, and said, in his usual supportive empathetic manner, “You bloody idiot. You were about to lose a wheel. You didn’t know that? That’s why you woke Tim’s mother?”
Sure enough, the left rear wheel was cambered obviously out from the vertical. Several of the lug nuts were missing. Dave shook his head, pulled out his socket set, snockered the remaining nuts down, and sent me on my way. How did it happen? I don’t know. I’d never had the wheel off the car.
And with all the splintered metal that lay ahead in my ownership of the Triumph, it was actually one of the more minor mechanical episodes.
It was the winter of 1985. I’d recently moved back to Boston after a sojourn in Austin. The lapse of judgment that was the ownership of the Triumph was now a dim memory. I had a least half a dozen 2002s under my belt. I’d returned to Boston with Bertha, a rust-free, heavily-modified ’75 2002, and needed to keep it out of the snow and salt. So I bought my first winter beater—or, as we say in these parts, a wintah beatah. It was a rusty ’69 running-but-not-driving 1600 for which I paid fifty bucks. I nursed it into drivability for very little money, threw a set of wheels with studded snows on all four corners, and drove it to work at my new job for the first time.
As I was driving down Parker Street in Newton, I began to hear a metallic rumble that grew rapidly and alarmingly louder. My mind barely had the chance to form the thought, “Wait a minute; the last time I heard that,” when BANG! The right rear wheel came off the rusty 1600. The right corner of the car scraped on its brake drum. The car slowed rapidly.
And then, the wheel passed me, hit a curb, bounced what looked like ten feet in the air, and landed in a hedge at the front of a house, narrowly missing a picture window.
I managed to pilot the car to a controlled stop, retrieved the errant wheel, jacked up the car, and mounted the wheel back where it belonged. (Nine years had passed since the Triumph incident; I now always traveled with appropriate tools and a small jack.)
I worked at the same location in Newton for the next 23 years. I swear, every time I commuted there along Parker Street, I mentally replayed the episode as I passed the location where the wheel went AWOL, and I could recognize the house with the picture window that almost had the wheel go through it from a real-estate lineup of hundreds of houses.
How did it happen that time? I’d just swapped the studded steelies onto the car, and I had obviously forgotten to tighten them down. I probably did the work out on the street. It was probably cold.
I can’t say that I this incident taught me to always use a torque wrench, but I did become maniacal about having tight lug nuts; 85 foot-pounds of torque is generally a good guide for lug nuts on small wheels. If you’re doing the stomp-on-the-lug-wrench-to-tighten thing, that’s actually not all that hard to achieve. Figure that if you weigh 130 pounds (as I did in my youth), and if you’re standing near the end of a foot-long breaker bar, that’s 130 foot-pounds right there, probably easily topping 170 when you stomp on it.
Not long after that, I bought air tools—a compressor and an impact wrench. I did a trial-and-error calibration to find out what setting on the impact wrench’s dial got me 85 foot-pounds; 4 on the 5-digit dial was very close. I got in the habit of setting the impact wrench’s dial to 4, leaning on the lug nuts with the impact wrench until I saw them stop turning, and calling that likely a bit tighter than 85 foot-pounds, and therefore safe.
I’m still running the same Sears compressor and Chicago Pneumatics impact wrench I bought 30 years ago.
It was Thursday morning. After several weeks straight of driving the Suburban through wintery weather, a few warm days had melted the snow, and two days of rain had washed away most of the visible salt. I pulled the Z3 out of the garage. I’d put the steelies and snows on it at the start of the winter, just in case, but convertibles are pretty miserable rides in the winter, so I hadn’t driven it much.
You probably see where this is going, don’t you?
I was driving the Z3 to work at Bentley when I heard a metallic rumble that grew rapidly and alarmingly louder. This time, the sound was hyperlinked to those two previous occurrences, and it activated the deep twitch reflexes of a sixteen-year-old video-game junkie, a fighter pilot, and a Bruce Lee that I didn’t know I had: A-ha! Can’t fool this silver fox! We earn our wisdom via the hardest-won experience. I stopped instantly.
I inspected the lug bolts on all the wheels.
On one, all the bolts were loose—one was fully backed off and about to drop. I don’t routinely carry a lot of tools in the Z3—it’s generally a well-sorted car—but it did have its factory lug wrench in the trunk. I gave the lug bolts on that wheel a good stomp. Then I checked the other three wheels. None was about to wobble, but all of the lug bolts easily acquiesced to addition tightening.
When I got home, I re-checked the torque-calibration experiment I did 30 years ago with the Chicago Pneumatics impact wrench. Setting #4 was no longer snocking the nuts down to 85 foot-pounds; I was now only getting about 30. The 30-year-old Taiwanese-made impact wrench had reached the end of its useful life.
I’m still surprised that a wheel rattled loose, as I hadn’t been driving the Z3 much. Perhaps I actually had forgotten to tighten that wheel at all.
So: As of today, I’m a changed man. I promise to use an actual torque wrench on lug bolts, every single time.
But the moment I get the Lotus running, I’m going to burn out Route 2 to Amherst at 2:00 a.m. so I can feel young, stupid, and fearless again.—Rob Siegel
Rob’s book Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic is available through Bentley Publishers, Amazon, and Bavarian Autosport—or you can get a personally inscribed copy through Rob’s website: www.robsiegel.com.
