Just a warning to all you guys out there. How many times have you had a tyre change and checked the wheel bolts afterwards? More to the point how many times ahve you been told by the garage to check them? The reasin I say this is because I had my front wheels balanced and a front tyre fitted last Thursday and saturday morning I was doing 50 mph and i started to get a thudding noise coming from the front of the car and a small vibraton through the steering. Thinking it was just a puncture I saw a drive way about 100yards ahead of me and decided to slow down and pull in. 20 yards later there was a bang and the near side front of the car hit the road because the wheel had come off so i was left driving on the brake disc. Luckily the guy behind stopped and offered to help out but we couldn't figure out how to get a jack under the car. he went back to his house to get some ramps so we could carefully drive the car up onto one of them to enable us to get the jack underneath. Eventually we got the car up and the wheel back on but we couldn't find any of the orignal studs back down the road so i had to take one out of each of the three other wheels. I limped the car back to the garage where the tyres had been fitted and told the guy what had happened. Luckily he was very understanding and straight away offered to sort the car out first thing monday morning. He even admitted he had been short staffed and he had his son helping out who hadn't had alot of experience in tyre fitting. I'm glad i was only on my way to talk the dog for a walk because an hour later I would have had my wife and kids in the car and the whole situation could have been very different.
I just thought you all ought to know don't take it for granted that your tyre fitter will have done your wheel bolts up properly. Even if they have you should always check them about 20-30 miles later and get them re torqued properly to the correct torque figure, otherwise unlike me you may not be here to tell the tale.
Regards
Mike
The Wheel came off!
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