Ask anybody who has bought a used car whether they checked for the locking wheel nut key at handover and the answer is almost always no. It is a small steel or plastic socket that lives in the boot well, the glovebox or a door pocket, and nobody thinks about it until a tyre goes down. By then the seller is long gone, and the honest explanation is usually that the key was lost years earlier by somebody else, quite possibly at a garage that never handed it back.
So the situation is not that you have mislaid anything. It is that the car has been missing its key for most of its life and the wheels have simply never needed to come off in your ownership. That is extremely common and it does not require a trip anywhere. Extraction is a mechanical job done at the car with hardened tools that bite into the outside of the nut and turn it off in one direction. It is done slowly, by hand, with the wheel still on the ground for the first crack so the whole load is not going through a jacked car.
Salt is what does most of them in. Cars parked out on the road, on York Way included, get the worst of it. We do that where the car stands in N1C, then fit a standard or replacement nut so the next wheel-off is a normal job. Whether it is Battle Bridge in rush hour or Euston Road at midnight, we answer. On Euston Road, day or night, the York Way area included, arrival across N1C runs 30 to 60 minutes. N1C takes in Pentonville Road and King's Cross, and we work the lot.
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Second hand cars change hands constantly in this part of London, and the key is the item most often missing when they do. It matters more here than in places with off street parking, because a car in a permit bay near Battle Bridge cannot simply sit for a fortnight while a replacement key is ordered. Handling the nut and the tyre in one visit keeps the car where it needs to be.
It is worth a couple of minutes looking before we arrive, because a key that turns up saves the nut. If it does not turn up, the extractor is aboard anyway, so nothing is lost by having a rummage. Manufacturers sometimes hold the key number against the vehicle, though that is a weekday errand rather than a roadside one.
Cars normally carry a single locking nut per wheel, so a lost key puts four of them between you and any wheel work at all. Where one wheel needs attention we take that one off and leave the rest alone. Where the car is due tyres all round, replacing the lot with plain nuts makes more sense.
Extraction goes wrong when it is rushed. The tool has to sit square, the alloy face wants protecting from the socket edge, and the stud underneath is a thread that will strip if the nut is fighting corrosion rather than the lock. Penetrating fluid, time and a long bar do this job. An air gun does the damage.
It complicates matters rather than ruining them. The broken piece has to come out before an extractor can sit properly on the nut, and that is picking work with the wheel still on the car. Slower than a missing key, not a different job.
Not in normal circumstances. The extractor grips the nut itself and the face of the wheel is protected while the tool is turning. Where a nut is set deep in a narrow recess we will say so before starting rather than afterwards.
A plain nut of the correct type and thread, torqued to the manufacturer's figure, or a fresh locking set if you would rather the wheels stayed secured. Either way you finish with something you can undo yourself, which was not true five minutes earlier.
It is built to be. The tools travel in the fitting van and the work happens wherever the car is standing, whether that is a side street in N1, a workplace car park or a bay near the canal. Nothing needs towing anywhere.
The same trip covers both. The nut comes off, the tyre is repaired or replaced, and the wheel goes back at the correct torque figure. Splitting it into two journeys would only ever suit somebody billing by the callout.
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