Let's look at this logically. Of the hundreds of thousands of lugs that are manufactured annually, some will fail. It is impossible to make that many lugs with all of them being perfect. By and large the failure rate may be 0.01, 0.1, or 1 percent. The only way you could distribute absolutely failure free lugs would be to x-ray or test everyone of them but then they would cost $500 a piece. Of course, one reason you have 5 lugs per wheel is that if one fails your car is still fail safe because you can still drive it. In your case you just happened to be one of the guys that had a failure. No big deal, just replace it and move on.

 

Sounds familiar...

 

I don't know where this baloney comes from. If that were true I'd have broken every stud I've ever tightened in my 50 some years of working on cars and removing wheels because I always use anti-seize on every one of them. Of course the anti-seize is on the threads not the tapered part of the nut. But most of the friction is in the thread to thread contact.

And if you twist off a stud or lug bolt head, it's going to happen trying to loosen a "frozen" fastener not tightening a lubricated one.

I'd love to take you up on that bet, "10,000 dollars"?:

 

Thanks for the feedback.
I've ordered new studs and nuts.
Hopping to have it fixed and ready to drive to the Corvette/Chevy Show in Houston by next weekend.

 

Just the one you broke, right?

 

Wheel studs are designed NOT to be lubricated. If they were they would be lubed from the factory. Lubricating wheel studs affects the required torque value and allows for too much clamping force and over stresses the stud. It can also cause the nut to back off! I can back my words up by experience and a few documents from General Motors and SAE if you like. Put some grease on the tapered part of the nut and you WILL break the stud or damage the rim long before the required torque is reached. In the 40 years I've been working on cars and trucks (36 of them a Master Mechanic) I have never lubricated wheel studs on a car during installation. There are several articles available on this subject and even some companies that sell lube and tells you on the label that you can use it for wheel studs! WRONG! Don't do it! If you've got rusty studs or nuts, replace them!


http://brakeandfrontend.blogspot.com...-lug-nuts.html

http://www.tirerack.com/wheels/tech/...jsp?techid=107

 

Totally.

Most all bolts are to be torqued clean and dry unless otherwise specified.

 

Some recommendations should just be ignored and this is one of them. A 10% over torque will not damage anything and that's what the lubrication will do. (Your link says the same thing about the 10%) I have never had a wheel lug loosen because of anti-seize. As I said before, you are a lot more likely to have a problem with a frozen lug and that's why I use it and will continue to.

I just recently bought a new 135i for my second car and put new wheels on it with all season tires. The shop doing the work allowed me to watch everything that was done. I saw the mechanic tighten the lug bolts (BMW uses bolts not nuts) with a torque wrench to the proper 100 ft-lbs using a star pattern. That in itself is unusual. Drove the car home ~10 miles and decided to take the rear wheels off because I wanted to paint the hub area where there was some rust. Brand new car, brand new lug bolts that were torqued properly. To my surprise I had to use all the force I could muster and I mean all the force on a two foot breaker bar to break two the lug bolts loose. I'm guessing I had something like 300 ft-lbs or more to break them loose and was sure I was going to break them in the process. I hate to think how frozen those bolts would have been had I driven the car for a year before trying to remove them. Anti-seize.

 

It felt like 300 lbs but the friction of the threads and the tapered contact point is why it felt tight. If you watched him torque the nut or bolt then that's what the torque was. If that bolt were lubricated it could have come loose by itself so it was doing what it was designed to do. Using an anti seize on the hubs to stop the wheel from freezing on the center is fine but not on the studs. Your call. Put what you like on your wheel studs. It's obvious I'm not going to change your mind, I just hope people research this before doing the same. The results could be disastrous.