I am lucky - wheel repair story

["Jan Nelson" <jnelson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

After waiting for awhile my Gottis returned looking very nice from the LA
Wheels America shop.  99.00 bucks ea, including r/trip freight.

Two nights ago just before putting the car to bed for the night, I grabbed a
shop cloth and started to wipe off the day's accululation of brake pad dust
and road grime.  As I was  happily bringing the shine back, I felt something
move under the rag, stopped and using my fingers turned on the the hex bolts
holding the wheel together.  I checked the bolt next to it and was able to
spin it also!  Crap.  I checked the rest of the wheel and found that four
bolts were wrong.  Two were loose and two seemed stripped!

I went to bed and drove the car to my mechanic at Black Forest Imports here
in Gig Harbor the next afternoon.  We removed all four wheels and found out
two things about Wheels America (at least on this job at at the LA shop)

1.  They do not apparently use torque wrenches... we were able to tighten a
number of bolts across all four wheels a little.

2.  Someone fell asleep at the wheel on four of the bolts.  Two nuts were
indeed stripped (again, where is that torque wrench?) and two were never
tightened, one almost completely off the bolt!

Now, envision just being a fun loving driver with new wheels going to one of
those lapping days w/o checking the work first.  Pretty scary stuff.  So the
moral of the story is please check your gear before you stear.

Jan Nelson
82 745i
83 745i with bitchin' polished, strightened and now assembled vintage Gotti
5 spokes.

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