Saturday, March 03, 2007

The exhiliration of a near miss

On Thursday afternoon I drove to Sarver with an elder to have communion with a shut-in. On the way back I suddenly started hearing an alarming knocking sound from direction of the left front wheel. From that point on I drove very slowly back to Tarentum.

I did not know what the sound was, but whatever was wrong sounded very expensive.

At my earliest opportunity on Friday I got the car to a garage to be checked out. I sat in the waiting room unsure what the news was going to be.

Eventually the mechanic came back and gave me the bad news: the wheel was falling off. The good news was that it was only caused by loose lug nuts, that the wheel had not fallen off, and that they had fixed it by retightening all the lug nuts.

It is still sinking in to me that I had been close to having a wheel fall off, and I easily could have been driving at highway speed when the failure occurred.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am glad nothing bad happened after what seemingly could have been a much worse situation. Anyway, I do have one question, how do lug nuts become loose on their own? This has me thinking, because I never knew that those things could just loosen up on there own. This gives a person something to think about if they do. I know I will pay much closer attention to this area of the car if this does happen on its own.

Stewart said...

I think lug nuts are not supposed to get loose on their own. I know that my car inspection was done a month earlier in the middle of the extremely cold weather we were having, and the knocking started on a day when the temperatures came up to 51. So I think the temperature change might have been just enough to loosen the lug nut.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing that with me. I did not thing they were suppose to come loose on there own. That is really scary. I know, I get scared of every little noise my car makes.