A highly embarrassing day yesterday, but one i want answers for!

My disco 1 has been off the road for about a year and was collected yesterday to go for its MOT. Not long after the driver left my house, i got a call to say the rear wheel fell off (around 5 miles from my house).

Thankfully it was just outside the garage, so a quick jack up, new wheel nuts and the car was at the garage. However, i do not understand what happened.

The obvious answer is that the wheel nuts were not tight.... but i am pedantic about the wheel nuts. The garage informed me that the rest of the nuts were also 'not that tight', so i then started to wonder why. He did notice a lot of movement when driving, but assumed it was just the mud tyres.

My wheel nut spanner that came with the car is quite short (maybe around 30cm). I considered that even through i stamp on the end of it, perhaps the arm is not as long as it should be. So today i went out and slackened a couple nuts, then tightened them in my normal manor, then took the torque wrench, set it to 129Nm (Ref Haynes), but frustratingly, the nuts did not move any before the torque was reached. This shows me that my wee spanner is applying at least the stated torque.

SO my question is 1) could anything else be going wrong? and 2) i have always been told not to over tighten wheel nuts, but read all over to make them FT (fckn tight).... so whats the thoughts on this?!

I have steel wheels by the way!

sounds to me like someone loosened them, maybe an attempt to rob them?

Tighten the nuts with your wheel brace, drive for a few days then try with the torque wrench again. If they don't move that does suggest they were interfered with (or you hadn't had your weetabix last time you tightened them)
If it was a theft attempt, would they loosen all the nuts first?

I'm no expert on steeling wheels, but I would loosen all of the nuts while the car is on the ground

I would definitely start looking at security!

Or the bolts have been over tightened in the past and the threads or studs damaged meaning they don't stay tight maybe?

LandyMan said:

I'm no expert on steeling wheels, but I would loosen all of the nuts while the car is on the ground

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Oh yeah, I suppose that makes sense. But not an expert you say....just an enthusiastic amateur perhaps?

I agree that this incident has the hallmarks of past attempted theft.
As an aside, I to used to stand on wheel braces & derided manufacturers for equipping their products with puny tools that were incapable of releasing wheel nuts & I always carried a socket/breaker bar. With age comes wisdom & I now know that if the nuts are tightened to the correct torque (as opposed to a hairy-arsed fitter using a rattle gun) the correct wheel brace WILL undo them. I once had a row with one of the best known drive-in tyre replacement outfits over this subject & ended up with an apology, a copy of their code of practice regarding the use of torque-wrenches & a voucher for a future service - Result

Check you've got the correct wheel and nut combination, depending whether you have steels or alloys.

Thanks for the replies folks. I am also wondering about wheel balance - they are big mud plugging tyres that make the car jump all over the road. Is there a chance that if the wheel was out of balance, it could work its way loose?

As stated check wheel n nuts but could also be caused by studs slackening out the brake covers. Especially if their mismatched.

could one of the nuts have been cross threaded? I had an alloy wheel with a cross threaded nut which caused the wheel to move enough to further loosen two other nuts then tightened itself up and sheared - all in 30 miles of B roads driving. I am convinced to this day that someone had tampered with the wheel before I set off