But I continued on, wiped the grime off the cylinder sitting upon a marble perch, and read a name I hadn’t seen in years: AERO KROIL. I knew that continuing my approach would knock at least seven years from my life expectancy, as the potent smell that I’d come down here for began triggering my nasal receptors. TURN BACK.” I was now just feet away from the tiny light, which stood directly above what looked like a small cylindrical object. I deactivated the booby traps, and pushed over the barriers marked “WARNING: DANGER AHEAD. It was pitch black down there spiders and rats abounded, and a tiny light flickered 500 yards away in a corner. I then hopped into my climbing harness, hooked into a carabiner, and slowly lowered myself 200 feet to my secret lair, which was really nothing more than a humongous dirt cave. “BANG” the cast iron closures went as they landed, breaking even more tiles. Then I grabbed my bolt cutters to get through a lock, and pulled - gripping with two hands, and leaning back hard - the two doors, which opened about their outboard hinges. First, I grabbed a sledgehammer to break the tiles in my kitchen, revealing secret bunker doors. Sonuva bitch!įrom there, I decided to break out the big guns. Shoving that onto the bare acorn nut resulted in, well, more peril. I knew this, of course, so I went down to an 18mm. I left the nuts to soak for a day, and returned yesterday to finish the job. I then liberally sprayed on my favorite penetrating lubricant, “Cleveland’s Finest,” as I like to call it - PB Blaster.
“Oh hell no,” I thought as I held onto that trigger for a few more seconds. This was a corded DeWalt impact I was using to loosen these nuts - it had been undefeated up to that point in lugnut removal bouts, but I was 15 seconds into holding its trigger and nothing was spinning. Anyway, that experience stuck with me, so when I went to yank the right front wheel off my recently-acquired $700 Chevy Tracker, and was met with a lot of resistance, terror shot through my veins. It was holding an aluminum five-spoke wheel to, if I recall correctly, a Jeep Cherokee XJ’s Dana 30 front axle I don’t remember what I did to solve that issue - I think I just removed the whole wheel hub from the knuckle, and recycled the hub/wheel together. The last time I dealt with a stuck wheel nut, I never did manage to get the thing off. A person who, when someone mentions brake work or suspension work or swapping out summer tires for winter tires, just stares blankly out into the distance, quivering ever so slightly before “coming to.” It’s bad it’s really bad. If you haven’t experienced a stuck lugnut in your days of wrenching, thank the car gods immediately, for it is a traumatic experience from which you will emerge a different person. Here’s how I triumphed above one of the worst foes in all of wrenching: the seized lugnut.
But, being the stubborn bastard I am, I didn’t give up. For hours I toiled to undo the that Y-hole’s dastardly handiwork, and for hours I failed. “Just torque it to spec you cretin!” I shouted into the sky, picturing that R-hole holding the trigger of that pneumatic impact, banging the lugnuts down until their threads plastically deformed. “Son of a bitch!” I yelled, cursing whichever J-hole had apparently run the lug nuts on my $700 Chevy Tracker’s right front wheel down with an impact.
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