Had a slow leak repaired over the weekend and to my dismay after I came back from grabbing a coffee the serviceman had used a compressor on the wheel nuts and sheared or badly damaged the nuts. At £4 a piece they're not something I relish buying.

Should they be taken off manually to get around this?

How do you guys look after your nuts?

Also, anyone know what exact colour of black was used on fuchs alloys?

 

The nuts do break often. The dissimilar metals of the nut & the wheel lead to oxidization. Use anti-seize on the thread & on the beveled end & torque at spec religiously.

Ian

 

There is a special soft socket available for their removal, I always remove by hand, never with air, you can also use plastic wrap inside a socket from what I understand.

 

The soft socket is fine for putting them on but you will ruin it if you use it with a breaker bar for removal. Anybody want to buy a ruined one?

Ian

 

and If anyone doesn't get the deal on Ians , I have one to offer too !!!

Actually mine doesn't fit into the recesses of my wheels on my 911 anyway ... so i have an impact socket and extention dedicated to this purpose, wrapped in duct tape of course... I figure on mine you can't see my nuts anyway .. :-)

 

Never use an impact wrench or let anyone use an impact wrench on your lug nuts. Even when I have tires put on my cars, I always make sure the shop I use will let me break them loose and let me tighten them. Some say I am **** about this, but I have been doing this for 38 + years and have never had one break or sieze. As stated earlier, you need to put anti-sieze or some other lubricant between the wheel and the lug nut. When those alloys metals meet without lubrication, they smear together (not always) and removal is a bitch.

 

Does anyone know what paint they used on black fuchs? I need to re-touch some rock chips on the centre caps....

 

Oh sorry .. I don't actually use an impact gun , those were just extras I had so dedicated it for this purpose. I always loosen and tighten with breaker bar and torque wrench respectively. The impact socket does not leave the nuts " pretty" as it takes off the anodization.

 

I'm very surprised by Ian's post, my experience has been more true to Spider's. Of the thousands of alloy nuts my shop removed/installed, I can't remember more than a half-dozen broken ones - all installed by others outside my shop. We used copper paste on the stud threads, and did the install with regard to nut condition on each car. When a gun was used it was throttled down to about 20 lb/ft max, then hand torqued with the car on the floor. We used special sockets that had broached corners (no contact between the corners of the socket and nut). Non-broached sockets just kill nut appearance. On concour cars or cars with undamaged nuts the whole process was done by hand, and final torquing was always done with a soft socket. FYI: The biggest problem that we had was in the old days (back in the day!) some aftermarket wheel locks were out there that had a torque spec of about 45 - 50 lb/ft. Along came the guy at the tire store, who slammed them down, along with the alloy nuts, to about 125 lb/ft with an unregulated air gun. Those were not fun! Talk about a 45 minute brake pad replacement turning into a 4-hour job from hell!
Pete

 

Rustoleum satin black is a pretty close match to facotry finish.....I used semi gloss on mine because I wanted them just a little more glossy...but not the full gloss look. There are other paints that are close as well....but rustoleum is readily available, cheap, and very durable.

 

You can use a glossy black and then cut it down a bit with 0000 steel wool.

 

One of the Wurth products (?Satin Black) is supposedly spot on...check the posts over at Pelican for exhaustive threads on this

 

Pete

I broke one after it had been on for only 3 months - with correct torque. I know, because I put it on. I had to drill it out of course - 3/4" hole saw btw. Since then I have seen a dozen posts here or on Pelican with broken lug nuts. So maybe not common, but common enough . . .

Ian

 

Hi, Ian! I'd suggest that you move to SoCal, but... Nah! We discovered early on that copper paste was the ticket, the silver stuff is just nothing but problems. Heck, out here putting the nuts on dry even works. We've seen that a ton of times when another shop had done wheel bearings, washed the hubs, and assembled the front end - without a little dab of paste on each stud. About the only time we replaced nuts was for cosmetic purposes. Of course, when the wheels looked as bad as the nuts...
Cheers, Pete

 

copper paste = anti-sieze with copper in it?

P AG specs a particular procedure and says to use Optimolly HT or TA.