A few years ago some friends of mine sold me a car. I like this car very much and I tend to dote on it. While I’ve been too busy to work on it much lately, I did find some time to give it a much needed bath and to put on the winter tires.

I need to explain: my friends used to live in the frozen mid-west and they had two sets of wheels for the car. One is a set of snow tires. While we don’t get much call for them in North Carolina, I tend to put them on around mid-November and remove them around mid-March.

This time I was pretty upset with the dealer (the last person to work on my wheels) as they has overtightened the wheel bolts, way past the 85 ft-lbs of torque required. I did manage to get the “summer” wheels off without too much damage to myself or the rims, but I wasn’t happy.

Unfortunately, after putting on the winter rims I started noticing some weirdness when braking. Yesterday the car developed a definite noise (a periodic “whup whup whup” sound) although the tires looked fine. Today when I drove to the co-op market, it was even more pronounced and I could tell it was coming from the front left wheel.

When I looked at it closely, I discovered the problem – the wheel was being held on by a single bolt. Uh-oh. I think I forgot to tighten that wheel when I put it on as it was the last one and I guess I was distracted.

They are five bolt wheels and I only lost two (two were barely on). I tightened the three remaining bolts on that wheel and “borrowed” one from another wheel so I would end up with two wheels with four bolts vs. one with only three. Tomorrow I’m off to the dealer to get some replacements.