search craigs list for your wheel and tire. what else is some thief going to do with it besides try and sell it? My opinion anyway.

 

It is bad to have lost the matching tire, but I wouldn't consider the wheel at much of a loss; it was most likely wallered out beyond ever being used again.


If it makes you feel better, it is highly possible that you DID INDEED properly torque the wheels.

We have big signs posted in our shop that state something along the order of "we are not responsible for whatever may happen when you leave here with aluminum wheels."

Those are not the lawyer words used in the signs, but that is pretty much what it means in plain English.

Aluminum is very soft, and even a brand-new properly installed aluminum wheel can and will loosen itself within miles.

I can't begin to count the horror stories, crushed fenders, ruined studs, and frayed nerves that I have witnessed every working day as a direct result of aluminum wheels, both factory and after-market.


Always, when I make these statements, there are a few that will jump in and truthfully claim that they have ran aluminum for years with never an issue.

But, dealing with them every day, and in the position our business places us in where everyone's problems and tragedies come to our door, I myself will never use aluminum wheels on any of my stuff.


As for the thief,


That guy knew that the trashed aluminum wheel would fetch about fifteen-bucks at the scrappers, once he removed the tire.

He might get another ten-bucks for the decent used tire, just about enough to repay him for having the tire dis-mounted so he could sell the wheel.


The scrappers will not buy scrap wheels with tires still on them.


Had that happened in my area, I would not have been the least bit surprised.

Gasoline, cigarettes, cable-TV, trac-phone minutes, etc. all together cost way more per month than the welfare check they draw; thus, Obamaconomy has created the highest theft and robbery rate in history.

 

Good point.....Never thought about the rim being junk after all that.

 

x2 I'm with Bearkiller. But the only aluminum rims I would consider running are Alcoa Forged 16x7 Bullets.

But even then our studs are not long enough for Aluminum rims.

If you really need a wider rim try the Accuride 16x7 Steel rims found on pre superduty Ford trucks.

Alas I'm sure we've stated our opinions here regarding wheels several times.

It is great that you didn't loose control of the vehicle and no one got hurt!

 

My lot in life places me in a position to see a lot more first hand situations involving wheel loss, flat tires, and bearing failures than the average bear, plus I get to hear all of the eye-witness accounts from the one that was ahold of the wheel when the mis-hap occurred.


I find it interesting to note that, in those cases where a tire catastrophically fails all of a sudden with a big BOOM and big strips of tread and such slapping around every which way, in nine of ten cases the driver states something like "I barely could hold it. I was standing up in the floor-board trying to steer. I thought for sure I was a gonna lose it."

In many of these cases, the driver is otherwise pre-occupied, busily text-messaging, eating a cheese-burger, and rolling a cigarette, when, all of a sudden, KERWHOOOM!!!, and in his sudden wheel-fighting brake-jamming panic, he throws the vehicle out of it's gyroscopic balance and all sorts of weird events take place in seconds.

Had the driver been stone deaf and unaware of the explosion, the reaction of the vehicle would have been more along the lines of my following description of losing a wheel.

Contrary to popular belief, sudden blow-out situations are always worse when the tire is on the rear of an SRW vehicle; a front-end blow-out is always easier to control.


On the other hand, when a tire just leaks down rather slowly, IF the tire does not over-heat from being run flat and react as already mentioned above, the driver is completely unaware of anything being amiss until they are slowed nearly to a stop, when the vehicle then decides to lay down on the un-supported corner; I have experienced this many times myself.


Interestingly, when the whole works just decides to part company with the vehicle, be it the bearings coming apart and turning loose wheel, hub, and all, or the lug-nuts failing and letting a wheel run off, in most cases, the driver has no idea that anything is amiss.

The missing element in these situations is the sudden panic causing howitzer being fired in the cab noise.

He will be cruising along and see a tire pass him by and then cut across in front of him and he will to himself thinking "Someone must have lost a wheel. I wonder where that came from."( In nearly every single such case, the driver will always about some poor soul losing a wheel, until it becomes evident just whose wheel it really was.Then, he's all )

Then, probably from the driver suddenly slowing to avoid colliding with the errant tire/wheel, the vehicle slows enough to lose it's gyroscopic stability and easily lays down onto the unsupported corner.

Had the driver maintained speed, it probably would have gone on for miles, all the time "driving like a Cadillac."

 

Man what kind of does that its one rim and unless he had a 8 bolt truck it would serve him no purpose and I hope you can find another set man and once again BK you've got some of the best stories on this site!!!!!

 

back in the 90s I was driving on the I-95 bridge that spans the Housatonic in CT when a pickup lost a tire while doing 60 mph. the driver got control of his rig but that tire took off like a shot on a diagonal across the lanes and did a perfect hop off the median strip...RIGHT ONTO THE DRIVER'S SIDE WINDOW OF AN ONCOMING VEHICLE DOING 60 MPH

well I looked in my rear-view mirror and thought "no way could that driver have survived" but I saw the car make an orderly transition to the right lane (this was a six-lane highway)

I called the State Police when I got into work and the next day a trooper called and told me that the driver of the oncoming car had been killed (a passenger brought the car to a stop somehow)

so tighten those lug nuts, boyz!

 

Sorry to hear about this Mark. I remember when early mopars had left handed lug bolts on the left side, if they still were, or if the right side had been loose, the lug nuts would not have come off. A simple safety layer that went by the wayside...Mark

 

that's actually a really sad story man...

Reminded me of this: many people find it funny. I however do not. This guy must have been hurt really bad. make sure those wheels are on tight folks... (that said, I think this runaway dually tire set was because of a multi vehicle pileup, sadly.)

 

A few years ago, the son and I were coming up a rather steep hill on a little side-road that junctioned with the main highway.

We were still a couple hundred yards from the big road and could not see it because of the steepness of the incline we were on.

All of a sudden, this big 11R-24.5 tire/wheel jumped at least two-hundred feet in the air, after hitting the very high road-bank of the bigger highway.

That thing spun around in the sun for what seemed like five minutes, before landing and heading our way like a rocket on rails.

It plowed through a really nice flower-bed, knocking humming-bird feeders every which way, red sugar-water raining down like the blood from a thousand wounded ducks, brushing alongside the neat-as-a-pin little cottage/house, making big black swirls on the pristine white weather-boarding, knocking loose the fancy black window-shutters and then heading over the hill straight towards us.


I was prepared to take as much evasive action as possible while a sitting duck in front of a bull-dozer gone wild.


Thankfully, it veered off, jumped the ditch, took out a freshly painted plank fence, and started making circles in the vacant lot, before finally laying down and doing that bo-i-i-n-n-g-g-g-g little act that pan lids and such make in the last seconds of their landing on the kitchen floor.


We hopped out and laid it on our truck-flat and hauled it over to the highway, where we found a big tri-axle dump-truck with a coal-bed and at least 36-ton of dense-grade sitting on the shoulder.

The centers of both left-rear aluminum BUDD wheels had broken around the bolt-circle.

The other tire/wheel had went the opposite direction, getting under the porch-roof of a brand-new brick house that belonged to a long-time friend of mine.

It made big black swirls on the new red brick, made several top to bottom jaggedy cracks along the mortar-joints, took out the entire soffit along the very long full-length porch, the rain-gutters were twisted every which way, every last shutter was knocked off.

The entire wall facing the road was one continuous line of expensive triple-pane windows; not a one of them survived.

Those multi-facetted flimsy white aluminum porch-pillars, one about every ten feet, were bowled over like nine-pins.


The many three-foot long concrete flower-pots were cracked and broken, broken flowers and black potting soil scattered everywhere, with tens of millions of little white styrofoam beads all over, making the front-yard look like the aftermath of a snow-storm or an explosion at a coffee-cup factory.


The guy that owned the house was sitting in his LazyBoy, back to the road, feet up in the air, an Elmore Leonard book hanging loosely in one hand, a half-cup of Maxwell House dangling in the other, sleeping through the last 27 minutes of Andy Griffith.

He told me he thought a tornado had hit.

His wife said, "boy, you should have seen him come out of that chair, after it flipped over backwards."

Thankfully, no one else was involved.

 

I showed this to my dad and he mentioned how he almost lost a wheel going down Donner pass in his first gen. He also lost a wheel completely locally.

how often do you need to check the lugnuts? I have NEVER checked mine.

 

i torque them, run them 5 miles and check them, run them like 50 miles and check them and then after 500 ill check them.. then i dont worry about them.

 

I may try to find left-handed studs and nuts for the left side of my truck so I don't have to worry about it...

 

It should be no trouble to find STANDARD left-hand studs/nuts, as both Ford and Dodge used them until up into the mid-80s.

Finding extra-length studs or chrome specialty nuts may be a problem, though.

 

Is the wheel and lug nuts loosening off more common with a 4X4 than a 2 wheeler?