I have used various anti-seize agents and grades of Loctite, but only when called for in valid instructions.
Using torque wrenches to get threaded parts to their proper torque is more important, as are using cotter pins and staking axle nuts, for example.
Read this!
And get some schooling!
Tester
Right after the comments about dry threads is this little nugget;
On some conical lug nuts, you can put a light coating on the seating surfaces of the cone, while avoiding any contamination with the threads
No, No, NO, NO! This is dead wrong. The friction of the conical surface of the lug nut is much greater than the contact area of the threads and contributes more to the torque reading than the lubrication on the threads. This is dead wrong and will give the wrong torque reading.
I donāt think anybodyās going to jump ship on this topic
Well?
I guess you know more than Brake And Front End?
Iād listen to a publication thatās been around for as long as I can remember, than someone I never met.
Tester
Considering that this is a Blog written by:
Andrew Markel is a former technician and service writer and he brings this practical knowledge to the Brake & Front End team as editor.
On a specialty web site written by an experienced guy who reads the specs and works on cars.
Since I am a degreed engineer with 40+ years wrenching on cars and 27 years designing chassis parts for cars. That means Iām the guy who writes the specs the tech followsā¦ Yes, Iād say I know more than this guy at Brake and Front End.
Iād be more than happy to meet you. I respect your vast knowledge, as its been displayed here many, many times. But on this, I respectfully disagree.
I donāt use loctite on anything on my car. The rust around here keeps all the bolts in place.
With all due respect to manufacturers and trade publications, they donāt live where I do.
I rotate my tires every 6000 miles and put anti seize on the studs and hub and still have to kick the tire hard to get the wheel off, I have seen a shop have to heat the center of a wheel here cherry red to get a set of snow tires off after they could not break the wheel loose with a sledgehammer. When I used to buy used cars I cannot tell you how many rusty studs and lug nuts I snapped off getting the wheels off for the first time.
I was always amused by the instruction that came packaged with the new studs telling you not to replace 3 studs on the same hub. What were you supposed to do? Junk the car?
I have an air wrench and puller standing by if I ever have to remove it.
No. The splines of the hub were also a problem. A lock nut would not have helped. I killed 2 birds with one stone so to speak.
I will point out that a great number of degreed engineers, including scores of PhDs, worked on the Space Shuttle program, and design flaws which were penned by those same engineers and then dismissed by NASA with āBad results havenāt happened yet, and therefore they will never happenā destroyed two shuttles and killed 14 people.
Youāve gotten away with it for 40 years, but that does not automatically mean that you wonāt have a failure in your 41st year.
The very same thing can be said about mechanics. Just following the spec as written by an engineer wonāt eliminate the possibility of failure any more than an engineer designing to the physics of the material having a failure due to bad material or poor decisions of the management staff.
Challenger was launched even though the engineers said not to - NASA management made the call to launch.
Columbia broke apart on re-entry, engineers were concerned about damage to the craft and again, NASA management made the call to proceed with re-entry.
In the interest of accuracy, Hardy and Mulloy were the two main people from NASA management who made the call to launch and who harangued Morton-Thiokol into reversing its stance.
Both were degreed engineers who worked as engineers.
Mulloy, in fact, was the chief engineer of the external tank development project, so it was his group that penned the design that destroyed Columbia.
ā¦ Oh, and Hardy was the project manager of SRB design, so his fingerprints are on the flaw that destroyed Challenger.
Itās hard to argue against success and itās obvious thereās been considerable success on both sides of this dead horse.
Not only that, but there is something else to consider about NASAās shuttle program: in spite of two catastrophic and tragic failures, from a dispassionate perspective, their safety record was pretty damn good.
Iād trust a NASA engineer way more than Iād trust an auto mechanic.
And yet both were managers who made those decisions in defiance of the engineers who actually designed the parts.
As I said, they were engineers who actually designed the parts (the specific parts that caused both disasters) before they became managers.
I donāt think the use of a lubricant has anything to do with this. Improper use of an impact wrench seems to be the most common cause of lug studs failing.
The closest I have come to using anti-seize or loctite on a car was for some car from the 70ās, I would put a drop of oil from the dipstick on spark plug threads, as the plugs had a tendancy to seize, and it worked for me. I do use loctite on the hinge screws for my glasses, I got tired of them constantly loosening up or disappearing entirely. Works for me.
I have an air wrench and puller also but no torch. I bent a rear wheel on my riding lawmower last year trying to get it off so I could service the brake even though they provided holes in the wheel for a puller. And yes, I had the lock ring off.
Wow so many replies! I was reading through all the comments and the same thing is going on in other forums. People have different opinions on what to use.
I was looking for some actual test and found this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3ndeXiZUeM
Now I am worried. I have driven the car around after I put those control arms back with all the anti-seize in the bolts. Should I replace the bolts too? Or cleaning will do?