Dangerous Wheel Hack You Should Never Use Washers Under Your Lug Nuts

It's never a good idea to hack anything to do with your wheels or your lug nuts. That's what we're going to talk about in this video.

The reason why you don't wanna use washers under a lug nut when torquing down a wheel, it's gonna loosen up. And that's not gonna be safe for the driver or anyone driving around the vehicle. The tire could fly off and hurt someone. For whatever reason, whoever was working on this vehicle last that had something to do with the tires, they put washers underneath the lug nuts right here, and right here. Now, you can see this lug nut looks like it's loosened up a little bit, that one is probably frozen, I'm assuming the same with this. And maybe that's why they did it. So, we're gonna take it apart and see what's wrong with it. Before I attempt to take any of these off, I am gonna spray these down with a little rust penetrant. Let it soak for a minute. You wouldn't normally do this when taking the lug nuts off, but I think these are gonna give me some trouble. So, let's let that soak. Now, we're gonna try and take any of these lug nuts off, see what we can do. So, this one is all stripped out, and this one as well.

All right. So, we got that one off of the washer. So, that's good. And same with that one. I'm gonna keep working at this trying to get it off with the gun. Worst case scenario, I could cut it off or drill it out. We have another video on that. If you're interested in that, check the link in the description. And there we go. Got it off. So, now I can pull the wheel off. And we can take a look at the lug nut holes. And you can see why they did this, why they put those washers because the lug nut holes are elongated. What probably happened one time, the lug nuts were probably not tightened down and someone was driving the vehicle and that caused the wheel to go back and forth and to elongate the holes in there. Well, that's not good. And just tightening up the wheels and putting washers on is not a fix for this. What they should have done was replace the broken studs or the stripped-out studs and replaced the wheel.

If some of the studs were not too bad, what you could do is take a tap and die set and just clean up the threads a little bit. Now, on these two studs right here and right here, it's too far gone. You need to replace these two studs, and you definitely wanna get new lug nuts so that they go on properly. If you take a look at this wheel right here where the lug nuts are supposed to go, now the lug nut is tapered and it's supposed to go fit in there securely and it doesn't. You can see that this wheel was loose, and that's why it ground down all that area right there while someone was going down the road. With this loose, they're lucky that they didn't throw the wheel off the car while this was happening.

At one point, this vehicle had these lug nuts, this loose wall was going down the road like that. And that's how that wore out like that. Just like that. And to make up for it, they took the washers, put the washers on so they could tighten down the lug nuts or at least two lug nuts. Now, that's not safe because you're not gonna be able to torque the wheel down properly with these or even the other lug nuts.

So, this vehicle needs a new wheel, new studs, and new lug nuts. Make sure you torque down that wheel so this doesn't happen and definitely don't use washers. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring that bell, turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos.