Stupid question about wheel nuts

Yep. I'm surprised you didn't know. The 850 has standard disc brakes, but also has drum brakes for the handbrake.
 
My car had four wheel disc brakes.
 
Lots of small cars even today are disc front and drum back- it's cheaper.

My Grand Prix is 4 wheel power disc, my Mustang is 4 wheel manual drum; you want to talk about night and day difference there you go.

The times, they are a changin'.
 
argatoga said:
My car had four wheel disc brakes.
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I'm pretty sure you had drums for the handbrake as well. Technically the 850's have 6 brakes - 4 discs and 2 drums for the handbrake. Very weird engineering solution. Ah, well, it's Swedish :)
 
Odd.
 
JipJopJones said:
Most of the time the handbrake cable is the culprite for a poor hand brake. there is often a tightening mechanism under the center of the car where the hand brake would be on the inside.
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But that only adjusts the tension on the cable, not the clamping of the handbrake shoes. Always adjust at the wheels first, and then do the cable other wise you run the risk of stretching the cable and snapping it.
 
At the moment my right brake shoe is actually slghtly rubbing against the drum, but I can only hear it if I drive really slow next to a brick wall. I've already jacked up the car and turned the wheel - there is not a lot of friction, so it doesn't really affect the driving of the car.
But it is annoying.
 
The drums should have their own adjusters that you can turn if one is binding. I'm only speaking from experience with 5 drums, but they all have snail cams.

I've seen the drum-in-disc handbrake before, not sure what it was on though, I'm assuming it was one of the cars on Wheeler Dealers.

As for removing nuts I use a standard breaker bar (not sure of the size, roughly a third of a metre) to get my nuts off, which are torqued to about 90Nm I think.
 
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I broke a wheel nut once when trying to undo it by jumping on the wrench. In such a way that a part of it remained on the bolt, still fastened. Now that was fun getting out afterwards :)
 
_HighVoltage_ said:
I'm pretty sure you had drums for the handbrake as well. Technically the 850's have 6 brakes - 4 discs and 2 drums for the handbrake. Very weird engineering solution. Ah, well, it's Swedish :)
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My little Honda has that same solution for the handbrake. 4 wheel discs, but 2 tiny drum brakes at the rear for the handbrake. :D
 
_HighVoltage_ said:
I'm pretty sure you had drums for the handbrake as well. Technically the 850's have 6 brakes - 4 discs and 2 drums for the handbrake. Very weird engineering solution. Ah, well, it's Swedish :)
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The latest model Monte Carlo has the same setup. Drums are inside the rotors. It has to do with the fact that it is much easier to link an e-brake to drums than to calipers.
 
Just came back from the garage. I asked them to loosen my wheel nuts in addition to the other repairs. They said - no problem.
When I picked up the car, my mechanic said he could not believe how tight those wheel nuts were on! He said he had to use a 4ft. breaker bar and a lot of force to get them off. But now they are ok :)
 
if you haven't done it already put some CU paste on the bolts, prevents that the bolts corrode in the thread
 
Yes, they've put some of that on.
 
Okaaaay....problem remains. I tried unwinding the bolts today, you know just to check if i can do it.
They still require ridiculous amounts of force and a lot of swearing! I can undo most of them but there are 2-3 which are stuck and my wrench keeps snapping off. In fact I can see the wrench starting to bend from the force that I'm applying.
Why do they tighten them so much? They don't have to be! It's not like the wheels are gonna come off now, is it? If they are tightened by a man with a simple wrench, there is no way that they will all fall off at a corner.

Oh, and the fact that the handbrake doesn't work doesn't help me at all. The whole car moves about, even though I'm in Park.

...and I have an oil leak.

I hate cars!
 
Tell the shop you go to not to use the air gun to put on the wheel nuts. Tell them to use the torque wrench and tighten them to 90 ft-lbs. (or 110 if you feel 90 is not enough).

You should feel some resistance from them at 90, but there is no way they are coming off while driving.
 
_HighVoltage_ said:
Okaaaay....problem remains. I tried unwinding the bolts today, you know just to check if i can do it.
They still require ridiculous amounts of force and a lot of swearing! I can undo most of them but there are 2-3 which are stuck and my wrench keeps snapping off. In fact I can see the wrench starting to bend from the force that I'm applying.
Why do they tighten them so much? They don't have to be! It's not like the wheels are gonna come off now, is it? If they are tightened by a man with a simple wrench, there is no way that they will all fall off at a corner.

Oh, and the fact that the handbrake doesn't work doesn't help me at all. The whole car moves about, even though I'm in Park.

...and I have an oil leak.

I hate cars!
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Find out the amount of torque that you are supposed to apply to each of your wheel nuts (Google, repair manual, factory service manual if you can find it) and buy a torque wrench and tighten it to factory specified torque. It *should* be alot looser than what most people/mechanics tighten it to (aka tighten with as much force as you godly can). I had a similar problem when I first got my car and a torque wrench was one of the best investments I ever made. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_wrench
 
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Buy an impact wrench. You can get a good battery powered one for under $200 on amazon.
 
I don't want to spend so much on something I will only use once...
 
argatoga said:
Buy an impact wrench. You can get a good battery powered one for under $200 on amazon.
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I tried to replace my front brake disc once and it required the removal of the wheel hub assembly (annoying hub over rotor design) and the large wheel hub nut (something like 36mm in size) is torqued to 181 ft-lbs. I rented an electric impact that supposedly is rated to 250 ft-lbs but didn't budge the nut at all. I finally had a friend who worked at a garage use an air impact and took it off with ease...not sure if its the rental equipment or a certain voltage/electricity requirement...but it seems that air tools are better than electric ones.
 
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