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Posted by Dana on Monday, April 28, 2008 at 17:08:50 :
I’m wondering if anyone else had ever experienced a problem like my step-brother and I ran into yesterday...
I wanted the bigger 20” tires from my project M-37 on my up-and-running M-37. So I thought we'd just swap the eight tires around; put these four on that truck, replace them with the four that were on that truck. Easy peasey, right? We changed the right front wheel/tire, then went to the right rear and MAN were those lugs on tight!! But it’s a ’51 so God knows the last time they were off (and well painted over too) so we used a cheater bar on the lug wrench. Only after we managed to strip out all five of the bolts... did we notice that the RIGHT side of the truck, lugs marked ‘R’ were left-handed thread.
?!?!?!?... So, we stopped at that point - I’ll worry about it later – and we moved to the left rear and started the same process...
We were going the correct direction for the left side (I’ve done this before folks and my step-brother is an old school MoPar nut, we know about the left and right sided lugs...) but we’re TIGHTING them! We looked – they were marked ‘L’ but they were in fact RIGHT HANDED THREAD!! We changed that tire and moved to the front which was correct for the left side. So the two front wheels/tires were in-tune with old Dodge trucks but the back two, both were mis-marked with the ‘L’ and ‘R’ stamped right into the lug! It’s not like someone switched the hubs, they wouldn’t be marked on the end of the lug ‘L’ and ‘R’. We had to take one of the other hubs off the other truck, knock out the lugs and replace the stripped ones. When they were getting harder to turn (before they got easier and started to spin/strip) my brother said, “Man, are they on there this hard?” I said, “Yeah, I’ve had ‘em on these trucks before where they were this corroded and rusted on and painted over, it almost always takes a cheater pipe and a lot of Umph!”
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