Where does that wheel think it's going? (by Ben)

As I sat in my car watching my wheel bouncing down the road past me while the car scraped slowly to a stop, I reflected on a few of the mistakes I'd made over the past few days:

You see, yesterday, I wrapped up with stage 3 of my on-going new hobby: Fixing up my Porsche 944. It is a pretty old car (1983), and requires a surprising amount of maintenance. Last week, the rear wheel bearings failed. For all of you non-car people, there is a set of ball bearings that fit right between the wheel (the round black thing with rubber on it that goes round and round), and the axle that the wheel is hooked to (the axle is the thing that the engine turns that makes the car go forward.). This little ring of metal balls (about the size of marbles) has the whole weight of the car sitting on it (well, there's one on each wheel so they each have 25% of the cars weight...but you get the idea), and keeps the wheel turning nice and smooth. This is what they look like:



Every so often, they wear out, or the little balls get chipped and they need to be re-greased or replaced. Mine had been making some noise lately, and I was just ignoring them, not wanting to do more car repairs. But porsches, like women, do strange things when you ignore them, and mine got back at me. One of my wheel bearings just broke. Literally. The ring that holds all the balls together just snapped into pieces. So instead of having the car gliding along on a ring of smooth-rolling ball-bearings, 25% of the weight of my car was rolling around on broken metal fragments and the ball-bearings were all over the place clunking around inside the wheel hub like a band of midgets wielding cast-iron maracas. Imagine the sound your car would make if, while driving along, in an instant your car had no wheels and was dragging across the pavement in a blaze of metal sparks and grinding noise. (This is fore-shadowing.) Then take all that sound and compress it into the inside of your wheel so the whole car reverberates with grinding madness and incessant click-clacking, and that's what my car was doing. It was pretty unbearable to drive, and I felt like my wheel was going to break off any second. (More foreshadowing.)

Conveniently enough, a brand new wheel bearing only costs about $10, and the seals that keep all the grease in there to make them smooth (think of it as PAM for your car's wheels), were only a few dollars more. But, I'd have to take off the wheels, dismantle the brakes, open up the hub (the thing that holds the bearings), scrape out all of the old dirty grease, and pick out all of the broken little pieces of metal from the old bearing. Then re-assemble the whole thing. This is about a 2 hour procedure, so naturally the first wheel I tackled only took about 8 hours. (I'd never done this before and was working on sparse directions from a website I found.) The second wheel (on day two) went much faster and smoother, until I was trying to hammer the parts into place (you're supposed to do it that way, it has nothing to do with my anger management issues) and I realized that it was near midnight and my neighbors were yelling at me. I had to wait until the next day to wrap things up. But I did, and in the process saved about $900 from what the local shop would have charged. Yay me! Way to save the family some hard earned money.

But the last part of the procedure was to tighten the big bolt (called the axle nut) that holds all of the wheel parts together. It has to be tightened to 350 ft-pounds of torque. Basically, that means that I'd have to have a 350 pound person standing on a one-foot long wrench that is twisting the nut in question until it was tight. All of the guys I know who weigh 350 pounds aren't nimble enough to stand on a one foot long wrench, so I went to the tire store. They told me I could use the breaker-bar I had to fix it. (A breaker bar is not an 80's themed dance club, it is a 4 foot long wrench.) I was suspicious, but took their word for it, and tightened all of the bolts the best I could, put the wheels back on, and cleaned up the mess I'd made in the garage and driveway, and reminded myself to not forget to tighten up the lugnuts when I was done putting all the tools away. It felt good to be done, and I hurried back into the house to spend time with my wife who I've been neglecting while fixing the car.

So, I got into the car this morning and, still nervous about the axle nuts being tight enough, I gingerly drove the car out around the neighborhood and towards work. It seemed to handle just fine as I merged onto our city's busiest 2-lane highway, and I quickly gained confidence and smiled with the smile of knowing I'd finished the job and done something right and saved some money. This was about the time that the sudden clank of the bottom of my car slammed against the pavement and grinded so fiercely and noisily that it distracted me from the quite amusing sight of watching one of my rear wheels go merrily bouncing past me down the road. I couldn't belive that I hadn't installed the axle nut tight enough! I hopped out of the car and diverted traffic to the other lane (where several semi-trucks were kind enough to run over my wheel, halting it's rolling progress and dragging it over to the side of the road.) I called my wife, who at this point was just feeding the kids breakfast, and asked her to drop everything, and bring me the tools I'd need to fix my mess.

As I waited, being jeered and stared-down by every driver I'd single-handedly made late for work, I took some time to take stock of the situation. The axle nut was fine. It hadn't budged a bit. The hub was intact, the bearings were fine, the only thing that had happened was that the driver's side wheel had just come off. But the wheel just can't come off, it has lugnuts that.... LUGNUTS! DON'T FORGET TO TIGHTEN THE LUGNUTS!!! I was supposed to tighten them up as soon as I was done cleaning up the mess, and I'd totally forgotten. The lugnuts, which I'd put onto the wheel when the car was jacked up in the air, couldn't be tightened until the car was back on the ground. But once the car was back on the ground, I'd put the jack away, then the wrenches away, etc etc until I'd totally forgotten the lugnuts. And as I stared back up the road towards the half-mile of irate drivers merging together to pass me, I could clearly make out a sparse trail of lugnuts, like breadcrumbs leading to my demise. Each one brining me closer to the metal carnage I'd just created.

The police were nice when they got there, being polite enough to not add insult to injury. They got the car jacked up enough to put on my spare, since my wheel that had gone on a short leave of absence had gotten clobbered and was now shredded and flat. I moved the car, and sat dejected in a nearby parking lot until help, ie. my wife, arrived.

My wife, the constant heroine and the level-headed part of our operation, was patient with my explanation though she still couldn't grasp my inability to remember one of the more important parts of the repair. Putting the wheels on right after a wheel repair must be the equivalent of a girl forgetting to put on her cute new shoes before the big dance, and accidentally showing up barefoot. I can see how she's baffled by my ability to survive in this world despite my poor memory.

We bought some new tires for the car, and now everything is better, though I'm having a hard time convincing myself that the $200 spent on the tires still leaves us a net $700 ahead of having a shop do the repair for us. And if Porsche repair #4 is any bit as exciting as the first three repairs, then I'm going to need every penny of that $700 to spend on cute new shoes for my wife to take her mind off the clanging that will inevitably be emanating out of the garage, late, some night soon.