A wheel is not really held on by its nuts. It is clamped hard against the face of the hub, and the clamping force comes from stretching each stud or bolt by a precise amount. That is all a torque figure is: the amount of turn required to produce the right stretch. Get it right and the wheel and the hub behave as one piece of metal. Get it wrong in either direction and they do not.
Once a wheel can move against the hub, even by a fraction of a millimetre, it moves on every rotation. The bolt holes elongate, the mating faces wear bright, and the wheel stops running true. The tyre is the next thing to suffer, because its bead is sitting in a machined seat on a rim that is now shifting under load, and the seal that holds the air is between those two surfaces. It chews. Air can go all at once, and a tyre that unseats at speed is empty before you have finished thinking about it. There are warnings first, and they are easy to dismiss: a light knock at walking pace, a wobble through the steering that gets worse across a few days, and nuts that turn a little before they bite when somebody finally checks them.
The clock is the difference between an hour lost and a day lost. We do the second, across SE17, with a live ETA so the wait is a known quantity. That includes on Old Kent Road, where sitting still is the last thing you want to be doing. A Burgess Park cul-de-sac or an East Street main road, tell us which. A tight terrace in the Camberwell Road area or a narrow bay on East Street is usually workable. A SE17 address in Walworth and one in Aylesbury Estate are the same round.
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The slow, congested run along Walworth Road is the worst possible place to notice this, because stop start driving and a rough surface hide a wobble completely. You then join the A2 Old Kent Road, get up to a proper speed for the first time that week, and everything the car has been trying to tell you arrives at once. If a wheel has been off recently, it takes about a minute to check the nuts while the car is standing in its bay, and that is a minute well spent.
A driver had a faint tick pulling away from the lights that vanished above about twenty miles an hour. Three of the four nuts moved by hand when they were checked, which explained the noise and a good deal else.
A wheel that came off in a bay on the Aylesbury had polished witness marks across the mating face. That shine is movement, and it means the wheel had been working against the hub for some time.
The rim on one car had scored the tyre bead where the two had been fretting against each other. The tyre was not repairable and the wheel needed a proper look before anything new went on it.
Listen at low speed. A regular knock or click that keeps time with the wheel and fades as you speed up is a classic sign, and a wobble through the steering that has appeared in the last few days is another. If either of those has started since a wheel was last off, treat it as urgent.
It is not. Over tightening stretches studs past where they recover, so they lose clamping force permanently or snap later, and it can distort a brake disc into a pulsing pedal. There is a correct figure for a reason, and both sides of it are wrong.
It is sensible, and after a short distance rather than a month later. Everything settles slightly once the car has been driven, and a check after the first fifty miles or so costs nothing. We torque to the manufacturer's figure with a wrench, and we will say so before we leave.
Sometimes, and only after it has been off the rim and inspected. If the bead has been scored or the rim seat is damaged, it will never seal reliably again and the tyre goes. The wheel itself needs checking too, since elongated holes do not repair themselves.
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