The worst place to discover a broken locking key is at the side of the road, and it is also the most common place, because that is the only time anyone tries to use it. The key sits untouched in the boot for four years, the splines corrode, and the first real load put through it shears the head clean off. Now the wheel is locked to the car and the jack is already under the sill.
We get these calls from around the gyratory and Junction Road regularly, and they are entirely fixable at the roadside. The sheared remains come out first, then the nut is extracted with a hardened socket that grips its outside and turns it out. The alloy is protected while it happens. Then the tyre job you originally rang about carries on, and a plain nut goes back in place of the locking one so the same thing cannot happen again on a wet night.
The nut in the glovebox is not always the right nut. We can come out in Archway, remove the nut properly with extraction tools rather than optimism, and fit a standard or replacement set so the whole thing stops being a guessing game. Tight in Highgate Hill foot, easy in Upper Holloway: neither stops the job. Level in Upper Holloway, sloping in Whitehall Park: we set the car straight first.
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Archway is all slope and junction, so the places you actually end up stopping with a flat are rarely the places you would choose to work on a car. A snapped key turns a fifteen-minute wheel change into an impossible one at exactly that moment. Carrying the extraction tooling as standard is what keeps that from becoming a recovery job, and the replacement nut means it is a one-off rather than a habit.
A driver on Junction Road snapped the key on the first pull. The remnant was drawn out, the nut extracted and the wheel came off.
A key that had sat in a boot for years crumbled near Archway station. The nut came out with the extractor and the tyre was changed.
A flat at the foot of Highgate Hill with a useless key. The car was chocked, the nut removed and the job finished at the kerb.
Yes, and it is a common call. The broken piece comes out first and then the nut is extracted from the outside. It is slower than a normal wheel change but entirely routine.
Yes, provided the car can be parked and chocked safely. A quieter side street off the gyratory is preferable to the gyratory itself, for obvious reasons.
They corrode sitting unused in the boot and the splines are shallow to begin with. The first heavy load they see is often the one that shears them.
The tool grips the nut, not the alloy, and the wheel face is shielded during the work. Care is the whole technique here rather than force.
A plain nut to match the other three, or a fresh locking set with new keys. Either is fitted and torqued properly before we leave.
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