2004 Ford Explorer - Lug nuts mystery

Recently I had new tires installed & mounted. I have lost 1 lug nut on the right rear & 1 lug nut on the right front. The manager at the tire shop told me someone must be stealing my lug nuts. I think that it was due to improper installation. Also the counter weight on the right front fell off.

Dealer seemed less then pleasant.
You wasted trip back to complain and he blew you off.

Yes, of course it is most likely due to improper install, but with out 24/7 video surveillance (prof) from the time the new tires were installed till you noticed the lugs falling off, it will be hard to prof otherwise…

I just hope you have already had ALL the lug nuts checked and torqued to proper specs… If not then you will probably be back complaining about a wheel off, if you are able to afterwards… :skull:

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It’s entirely possible the shop manager is correct that someone is stealing your lug-nuts. Were all the other lug-nuts still there installed to the correct torque (i.e. tightly)? I’ve had an incident where the lug nuts became loose and the wheel started wobbling, but when that happened all of them were loose, not just one or two. That was almost surely a shop error, my error actually, b/c I am a diy’er, so my own shop. In your case I’m sort of going along with the shop manager, shop isn’t to blame.

So what can you do about this issues going forward? You could do what I do. Whenever a shop removes any wheels on my vehicles, back at home base the first thing I do is loosen, then re-torque all the lug nuts in 3 rounds and proper sequencing to spec. I’ve never found any lug nuts to be too loose, but I routinely find them too tight.

Wheel weights fall off all the time. And they cause tires to leak at the beads. Generally the wheel-weight at the bead is a poor tire-balancing design imo. I have two full coffee cans of wheel weights I’ve found on walk-a-bouts that were just laying in the road. There’s another way to install wheel weights, gluing them to the inside of the rim, but I don’t know if that’s any better. Certainly seems better from the point of view of the bead leak.

No mystery, just replace the lug nuts. Less than $10, problem solved.

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Most tire shops will state either verbally, or on the invoice that the lug nuts be checked for proper torque after so many miles.

And if the customer doesn’t have the capability to do this, to return the vehicle and the service will be performed for free.

Were you told this. or is it stated on the invoice?

Tester

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Why would anyone steal 2 out of 20 lug nuts??

Because that’s how many they lost.

Tester

I bought an old beater once for near scrap prices. One of the rear wheels was held on with 2 of 5 lugs. The other three were just broken off… :roll_eyes:

Irrelevant story.

Yes, it was probably improper install. 1) Get a couple of new nuts for next to nothing (at ANY AP store). 2) Install. 3) Check torque on all other lugs. 4) Don’t go back to that tire shop.

Pretty simple, really.

The four wheelers doing off-road used to tell us to check the lug nuts whenever you get out of the truck because they would tend to get loose. I can believe that, if you’re weekending it out there in the dirt. If the tire guy doesn’t get the holes lined up, all the nuts could come loose or just fly off altogether. Or is that allapart?

I had that once. We never did figure out why, if someone loosened the lugs or what. It was on the son’s car. Couldn’t figure out the noise but decided it needed front tires anyway. When I got to the tire place I knew something was definitely wrong. It’s been over 20 years so a little fuzzy but they were all loose on one wheel and seems to me one was missing. It kinda figured it was a prank since no work had been done and the wheel was fine.