Every car has a figure for how tight its wheel nuts should be, and it is a real engineering number rather than a polite suggestion. What holds a wheel on is not the nut biting down, it is the stud being stretched very slightly, like a stiff spring, and that stretch pressing the wheel against the hub. Too little and the stretch is insufficient, the joint moves under load, and the nuts work loose over the following days. Too much and the stud is taken past the point it springs back from, so it holds less than it should and may shear. Both failures come from the same place: nobody measured.
A torque wrench measures. It clicks at the number and then it stops mattering how strong the person holding it is. A breaker bar with a foot on it does not measure anything, and neither does an air gun, which delivers whatever pressure and whatever wear its trigger and its hose happen to add up to that night. At two in the morning in a dark bay, with the driver cold and wanting to get on, the temptation to finish by feel is at its highest. That is exactly when the wrench is worth the extra thirty seconds it costs.
There is no closing time and no answerphone. A call from Lupus Street at 11pm and a call from a driveway at 11am are handled the same way: answered, priced, dispatched. Ours can repair a puncture to British Standard on the spot or fit a replacement and balance it, at whatever hour you rang, anywhere in SW1V. A St George's Square cul-de-sac or a Churchill Gardens main road, tell us which. A tight terrace in the Dolphin Square area or a narrow bay on Grosvenor Road is usually workable. A SW1V address in Belgrave Road and one in Warwick Square are the same round.
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Working in a controlled bay off Belgrave Road at two in the morning is cramped, dark and cold, and none of that alters what the fixings have to be tightened to. The wrench does not care what time it is. If anything the discipline matters more at night, because a rushed job in poor light is how a wheel leaves either over tightened or slack, and neither announces itself until the car is somewhere else entirely. Your car keeps its bay, and it leaves with the nuts set to a figure rather than to a feeling.
A car came to us with a vibration under braking that had appeared straight after a wheel change elsewhere. The nuts had been run down hard and unevenly, which distorts a disc more reliably than heat ever does.
Nuts done up by feel on a Friday night were audibly slack by Sunday. The joint had never been clamped properly, so the wheel had been moving fractionally against the hub the whole time.
A tyre fitted at midnight off Belgrave Road, nuts brought up in a diagonal sequence and then taken to the figure with a wrench, in the same order and with the car on the ground.
Whatever the manufacturer specifies for that car, which varies a good deal between models. There is no universal figure and no safe rule of thumb. That is the entire reason for using a wrench that can be set to a number rather than deciding by how it feels through the handle.
Easily, and it is more common than under tightening. Past a certain point the stud stops springing back, so it clamps with less force than a correctly tightened one, and it may snap next time somebody undoes it. Over tightening also distorts the disc, which is where a great many braking judders come from.
Not for final tightening. An air gun cannot tell you what it has applied, and what it applies varies with line pressure and how worn it is. We bring the nuts up by hand in sequence and finish with a torque wrench so the number is known rather than assumed.
Only the temptation to hurry. Cold hands, poor light and a driver waiting are the conditions under which corners get cut, so the sequence stays the same at three in the morning as at three in the afternoon. We run every night of the year and the procedure does not get shorter after dark.
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