Something I never saw before

steingar

steingar

Taxi to Parking
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steingar
Took a short ride on Il Negrini the other day to warm up the oil prior to oil change. Went to the local market where I saw a wheel come completely off a car in motion. The car screeched into the nearest spot while someone else caught the liberated and still rolling wheel.

No lug nuts on the rim at all. I asked if she had a jack, she said no. I asked if he had AAA or an insurance rider, she said no. I was on the bike, so not much I could do at that point.

There was definitely a story there, since it was a fairly attractive young lady sporting an infant child on one hip and a fresh shiner on one eye.
 
Before my wife & I were married, I was driving her dodge dakota with her, and it just felt "wrong". There was a weird vibration in the steering wheel. I asked her if it was always like this, and she said she hadn't noticed anything. When we got to where we were going, I checked the front wheels to find all 5 lugs of the right wheel loose enough to turn with my fingers. How long would it have held on? Turns out her dad had taken the tire off to be repaired and didn't torque the lugs nuts.

No black eyes though.
 
Jim K said:
Before my wife & I were married, I was driving her dodge dakota with her, and it just felt "wrong". There was a weird vibration in the steering wheel. I asked her if it was always like this, and she said she hadn't noticed anything. When we got to where we were going, I checked the front wheels to find all 5 lugs of the right wheel loose enough to turn with my fingers. How long would it have held on? Turns out her dad had taken the tire off to be repaired and didn't torque the lugs nuts.

No black eyes though.
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So, uh, did dad approve of your relationship with his daughter? I smell sabotage here.
 
steingar said:
There was definitely a story there, since it was a fairly attractive young lady sporting an infant child on one hip and a fresh shiner on one eye.
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Does she live in a single or double wide.??
 
Watched a set of duals pass the school bus they were on once. Driver about had a melt down, of course everyone was doing their best to calm her down. :rolleyes:
 
Yes…Had a Isuzu Trooper loose a rear wheel at 70 mph…sheared at the spindle and tire and brake assembly passed me as I was dragging ass down I-10…only indication was a high frequency buzz for 2-3 seconds prior to its come from together…my first thought prior to separating was I need to check that tail rotor…(Young Army MTP at the time)…used axel from a wrecked Trooper, put on by the Ford dealership located a mile from the incident got me going again.
 
I was about 16-17 years old....this back in the early 1980's .... Dominoes Pizza and their 30minutes or it's free had only been a thing for a short time as far as I know... and at least in those parts I think pizza delivery was just a new thing more or less....
and the pizza delivery guys all drove store owned cars that were all painted with the company logo's ...and not their own cars with a magnetic sign on top like they do now....

There was a local pizza chain, competing with dominoes I suppose.... they had a fleet of old beater VW bugs

I can still picture it like it was last week.... I'm driving up a 2-lane road, I'm just crossing a short bridge heading up a shallow hill....pizza bug heading the opposite direction. 45MPH zone as I recall, so our closure rate was probably well over 100 MPH :cool:.... he's probably 500 feet or so ahead of me, closing fast....
I see sparks flying...and his driver's side rear tire and wheel rolling down the road in my lane and passing the Bug, bouncing and rolling...and with every bounce getting higher and higher. I hit the brakes but had no place to go...with a big ditch on one side and a sliding VW on the other. It looked like the tire might bounce right over my car, and I remember trying to consider my speed and time it so that it might pass me at the high point rather than the low (not that I had any chance of hitting that just right and I knew it)....but as it neared it crossed my lane into the ditch.

Anticlimactic really.... but it was eye opening for sure
 
Many, many moons ago, when I was 12, my buddy, Frank and I washed cars at the gas station outside our neighborhood.
We were standing there one morning when around the corner came a car tire. It slowly rolled right into the gas station, bumped one of the pumps and just stood there.
A minute later a car comes around the corner and pulls into the station. An old lady gets out and asks to talk to the mechanic.
Her car is making a funny noise, says she, and doesn't seem to steer properly.
Probably because her right front tire is sitting at the pump waiting for her to arrive.
She didn't have a clue.
Frank and I dragged the portable jack out, Mr. Koerner found enough lug nuts to put her tire on, she bought some gas and went on her way.
It's still a mystery.
 
ok Shepherd, you win...your story is better than mine!
 
As a young trucker in the late 1970's, I got a trailer tire flat. Got it fixed at a truck stop on I-90 in NY near the OH border. The tire changer did not properly torque the spoke lugs (very bad mounting system used back then, not so much now). By the time I got to Indiana. I had a tire roll off the trailer on the Indiana toll road. With the spoke system(also called Dayton wheels), the inside tire is held on with the outside tire. By the time I stopped, I had lost the inside tire, and the two tires on the other side both blew out due to weight imbalance
. I still had four tires back there, as there are 8 total.
 
It must be a thing from the '70s, reading these messages. As for me, I was about 15 in those years, and hitchhiking on holiday in southern Italy with another friend. We got picked up by a guy who started going pretty fast on a tiny bendy road. At some point we heard a crash, and I distinctly remember seeing the rear wheel passing me while we came to a stop. At the point we realized that the guy was a complete nutcase, and quietly disappeared leaving him to his problems. Nothing we could have done as he had no spare tire or tools anyway.
 
I was on the Baltimore beltway last summer and I look in the mirror and think "hmm, that looks bad" as a large SUV with it's right front tire missing is coming up at speed through traffic with just the rim throwing sparks. It passes me with a young black woman on her cell phone driving like there's nothing wrong. I was waiting for the rim to catch one of our spectacular potholes and roll it but I got off on 70 west to the airport and missed it if happened. I was too stunned to even think of pulling the phone out and filming it.
 
Seems to happen a lot with some of the lifted trucks and Bro-dozers where they run wheel spacers in between the hub and the wheel to push the tires further out of the wheel well. Lots of stress on vehicle lugs as well as cheap Chinesium wheel spacer materials end up snapping all the lugs and a wheel departs the vehicle. Proper lug torque sequence and final torque value are imperative in those applications.
 
Nearly a lifetime ago, I had done some hasty maintenance to my Porsche 924. (I know, it’s really a vee-dubbya) Driving to the grocery store something felt odd, and I got it stopped before the front-left departed. I had simply forgotten to tighten the lugs.

Next came the phone call to home. “Hi, honey. Can you take a minute to go to the garage and …….” My wife wasn’t entirely pleased.

I always be sure I have double checked my fasteners, as well as other things before going to the next step on almost any project.
 
Eric Brunelle said:
With the spoke system(also called Dayton wheels), the inside tire is held on with the outside tire.
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Man, I hated those. I was actually pretty good at mounting them on the vehicle and getting all the wobble out.

Don't get me started on split rims...
 
I saw it happen on a trailer about 15 years ago. It was a loaded 4 place snowmobile trailer with dual axles. Came up behind it on the interstate and I could see the left rear wheel fiercely wobbling and sparks coming from something under it (at night). In my mind there was no way the driver couldn't feel that vibration, but he just kept on going. I didn't want to pass him thinking the wheel would come off so I stayed a couple hundred feet and within 3 minutes the wheel came bouncing off into the median. Guy just kept on truckin'. I pulled up next to him and yelled that his wheel came off, he just gave me a kind of "hi, go away weird guy" wave so I just kept on going. Would've liked to have heard the conversation if and when he got where he was going.
 
Zeldman said:
Man, I hated those. I was actually pretty good at mounting them on the vehicle and getting all the wobble out.

Don't get me started on split rims...
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Ok. I'll start it. I used to work in a service station that repaired tires. Those things are evil. At least to someone seeing them for the first time.
 
luvflyin said:
Ok. I'll start it. I used to work in a service station that repaired tires. Those things are evil. At least to someone seeing them for the first time.
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I was too stupid to know how dangerous it can be when putting air back in the tire.... I did not clang one in the cage, but someone else did and everyone in the building heard it.
 
Zeldman said:
Man, I hated those. I was actually pretty good at mounting them on the vehicle and getting all the wobble out.

Don't get me started on split rims...
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for sure inflating split rims - boom!

should have read the rest of the thread... sigh
 
Amusingly I was driving home just now and at the entrance to a smalls strip mall (where there had been a tire store until they moved up the road a bit) was a pickup truck missing the left front wheel.

I couldn't help singing "You picked a fine time to leave me loose wheel."
 
flyingron said:
Amusingly I was driving home just now and at the entrance to a smalls strip mall (where there had been a tire store until they moved up the road a bit) was a pickup truck missing the left front wheel.
Click to expand...

I hope the truck didn't just come out of the tire store...
 
Shepherd said:
Many, many moons ago, when I was 12, my buddy, Frank and I washed cars at the gas station outside our neighborhood.
We were standing there one morning when…
Click to expand...
Reminds me of my grandpa. He and a buddy used to hang out near a muddy spot in the road, and when cars got stuck they’d help push them out. Usually resulted in a tip. I forget how long he said it took them to carry enough water from the creek to get the road muddy enough.:rolleyes:

At age 12, he ran away from home to go to Alaska, but had to go back home after 3 days because he lost his $8. A lot of money for 1924.

I have recently put two and two together, and realized that the money he lost was probably not legitimately acquired.

Not really relevant to the discussion, but it caused me to remember my grandpa for a bit. :cool:
 
thought for the future - take 1 lug nut off each of the other tires so each one had 3, then carefully drive to the auto store and buy 4 more.
 
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