90 Reason to be persistent

[Haych]

Nothing riles me more than the thought of being exploited! I refer to my recent problem that arose from some pissant at tyre garage using a rattle gun on my security wheel bolts. When this happened I was naive as to what trouble this can cause having never having had any dealings with the security bolts before.
So when my car wheel had to come off to re secure my CV boot it just would have to be the side of the car that I had the bolt problem. It was a phone call to a dealer that woke me sharply as I found out 90 quid for a replacement tool and I have to wait a week or more. For that money I expected them to deliver and do the job for me, salesperson did not like that comment, cannot think why, may be they have heard it before.

Follows is my story of how I dealt with the situation;

9 am sharp into the garage; first I tried to grind down the wheel bolt removal tool (here on in known as the tool) the idea simply to grind off the mashed up tool protrusions and expose good clean contact. This was quick to do and as quick to fail…. What next was several brews and lots of head scratching when I had a Eureka moment. “Bolt the tool to the wheel bolt”

Using a small Piller drill, pilot drill the Tool. Finding centre was easy due original manufacturing marks. you can see in this picture the lugs 4 off that protrude and are supposed to catch in the wheel bolt with opposing grooves. the thing is as you see in later photo is the point of contact is very shallow.

After the first hole drilled,

fullsizeoutput_5c.jpeg[/attachment) Drilling this hole i used the Tool as a guide for concentricity. So now i had a 3mm pilot hole in the wheel bolt and the Tool. The bolt now passes through the tool as i allow some clearance for the 8mm bolt You can see the difference as the spigot on the end of the original bolt has been drilled off. Now i continued drilling the car's wheel bolt to 7mm diameter for tapping with 8mm tap for the 8 mm bolt. Now with the wheel bolt on the car drilled and tapped and the clearance hole drilled in the Tool. I test fitted them. All was fine the 8mm bolt now clamped the Tool securely to the car wheel bolt. So came another test fitting the 17mm socket i tried to undo the wheel bolt, but alas it slipped again, looks like a combination of the Tool being worn and the bolt i had not tightened up enough. Doh only one thing left to do. Yes, repair the Tool. I drilled out all of the 4mm lugs with a 3.8mm drill and cut up a 4mm drill shank and pressed them in using a vice. so now i have a Tool with 4 new lugs. Hay presto success . It might be 5pm now and a day wasted thanks to pissant but i managed to get all of my other wheel bolts out and present them to the bin eBay suppling the replacements, 4 bolts in each wheel will do for the time being.. Sorry all photos out of sync, i get sick them keep moving during draft . [attachment=0]fullsizeoutput_4a.jpeg

fullsizeoutput_4b.jpeg

[EDC5]

Excellent! glad you got that nightmare sorted.

I'm not a fan of impact drivers generally, especially when doing up wheel nuts, they should be torqued properly.

My C5 has the same wheels but thankfully no security bolts, they must have been an option when new perhaps?

[GiveMeABreak]

Standard on these Elis - so I suspect they have been replaced previously, but they have gone through several part changes since 2008.

[Hell Razor5543]

When I had security bolts (and nothing to replace them with) I did the normal bolts up to the right torque (100NM), and the security bolts to half that. On the one occasion I had to use a tyre place I removed the security bolts before I went there. When they commented on this I courteously explained that I would be fitting the security bolts myself, using a torque wrench and not an impact driver. The look I got spoke volumes! I managed to get four normal bolts a week later.

[Gibbo2286]

That looks like a lot of work, when two of mine failed I popped into the local tyre place and they had them all off in ten minutes, I replaced them with standard bolts from the breakers yard, can't see much chance of anyone wanting to steal these wheels.

Most tyre bays tend to be well prepared for these failing.

[wheeler]

The first thing i do when i get a car now is bin the locking bolts & fit plain ones. I think the last time i heard of wheels being stolen was the late 90’s

[moizeau]

Back in the day of wheel thieves, the clever ones used to nick one wheel first, hoping you'd got an alloy as a spare, couple of nights later, come back for the other four, full house!
Just a thought on the method above. Got my thinking....If you were to drill an off centre hole through the special socket and the wheel stud, then pin it, it can't spin.

[Haych]

Yes, if i did the job again i did not need to drill in the wheel bolt as deep. The waist on the bolt should not snap as the bolt going through the wheel bolt tool just locks in place and should not be taking any load when undoing the wheel bolt. so now i have modified the tool i i buy new security wheel bolts, drill down about 4 mm and thread is should be ok especially if you use a smaller diameter bolt.
job done and you should have no problem if future?

[ksanturion10]

Really nice solution . Will have to do something similar for mines, as they started getting worn, just at their 3-rd season already

[van ordinaire]

The problem with rattle guns is many of the people that use them - especially in tyre shops.

Those particular security bolts have a serious design fault: the pins in the tool work loose, certainly not up to transmitting the torque a commercial rattle gun develops.