A locking nut is a hard core with a soft outer sleeve, and once a key has chewed that pattern flat there is nothing left for any key to grip. An extraction socket works on the sleeve instead. Inside it is a reverse cut spiral, tapered so the mouth is slightly smaller than the nut. It is driven on with a hammer, the spiral digs into the outer skin, and every turn in the undoing direction pulls it in tighter rather than letting it slip.
Which is why it comes off with a long bar and steady pressure rather than an air gun. The bite gets stronger the harder you pull, provided nothing is snatching at it. Done properly the wheel face is untouched, the stud is never shocked, and the nut ends up inside the socket rather than in pieces on your driveway. After that you pick a plain nut or a fresh locking set for that corner. It is a twenty minute job that some garages will not take on, and it is almost never urgent, so it can happen at a time that suits you.
It is worth saying that this is not an unusual call. We come out with the extraction kits to Whitton, St Margarets or anywhere in between, get the nut off where the car is standing with the alloy protected, and then deal with the tyre itself. The wheel comes off in Strawberry Hill, not on a ramp in Hounslow. Nothing is towed out of St Margarets or Whitton; the work finishes there.
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This one is hardly ever an emergency, which is just as well in a town where the roads can be effectively closed to you for half a day at a time. It is the job that stops an MOT going ahead or a spare going on. Pick an evening, leave the car on the drive in Strawberry Hill or wherever it lives, and it gets dealt with without anybody driving anywhere.
The usual pattern. Three came off with the key and the fourth had already been spun by somebody in a hurry. The socket bit into what was left of the sleeve and the wheel came away without the alloy being touched.
When the key turns freely it is the splines inside the key that have gone, not the nut. Ordering a replacement key is no help at that point. It needs a tool that grips the outside, which is what we bring.
A driver in St Margarets had a good spare, a jack and no way at all of getting the wheel off. We freed the nut, swapped the wheel over and put a plain nut on that corner so the next time is simple.
It grips the outside instead of the inside. The spiral in the socket is cut the wrong way round and tapered, so hammering it on embeds it in the sleeve, and turning anticlockwise wedges it harder. The more the nut resists, the tighter the tool holds.
Almost always, because the load goes on smoothly through a bar rather than in bursts through a gun. Shearing a stud is what happens when somebody shocks a seized nut. If a stud already looks stretched or badly corroded you will hear about it first.
Reckon on twenty minutes to half an hour for the extraction itself, plus whatever the tyre work needs after it. That is slower than a normal wheel off and it is deliberate. Rushing this stage is how alloys get scarred.
Not at all. We need to reach the wheel, not to move the vehicle. If it is parked very tight to the car beside it, have a look at whether the wheel in question is on the open side, and if it is not we will work round it.
No. Usually only one nut on each wheel is a locking one, so it is that single nut being replaced, not sixteen of them. Where several have been rounded over the years a matched set makes sense, and we will tell you which situation you are in.
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