Have you ever been working on a job and everything goes wrong?
Well, that happened to us just recently.
Check it out.
So I'm going to do a brake job on this car and things don't always go as planned.
As I'm doing it, a lug nut got stuck on the wheel and I couldn't get the wheel off.
What happened was the lug nut itself has a little cap and when the cap separates from
the lug nut, a lot of moisture gets in there and starts to rust and inside it's all rusted.
It's frozen to the hub assembly.
So what do we do?
We tried to get a smaller socket on with a long breaker bar with a pipe on it, almost
four feet long and it still wouldn't come off.
Something's definitely going to break there.
And then use the most powerful impact gun we had in the shop.
Still wouldn't come off.
So we decided we were going to drill it off.
Drilling it out is going to be a lot safer for the wheel versus heat or versus reusing
an air hammer or an air chisel because you might slip and damage the wheel.
So we started drilling.
Started with a small drill bit and worked our way up.
What I'm going to start out with is using a bur attachment to a die grinder, and I'm
just going to try to get a nice center so that I can drill.
It looks pretty good.
You could take a center punch and just give it a punch and get a good spot to drill.
Now this is going to be a long, tedious process.
What we need to do is start out with a smaller drill bit.
I do have a cup of oil so I can dip the drill bit to cool it down every once in a while,
and I'll just start drilling.
Okay.
Let's see.
Just clean this out.
Take a look at it.
Because my hole is so off-center, I'm actually going to use the bur tool again with the dye
grinder and try to get it a little closer to center.
Now, I'm going to switch to a larger drill bit and try to get this center as well.
We were able to get it off.
Whoa.
Did you get that?
Nice.
So, that's good.
Let's see.
No lug nuts actually frozen to the wheel.
That's crazy.
I'll take some pliers and just pull this lug nut off.
And it doesn't even want to come off with pliers.
There we go.
So even though we were going in at an angle, which isn't perfect, you want to get as straight
as possible.
I did not penetrate this side of the lug nut, which did not damage the wheel at all.
So you could remove this with a torch or you could remove this with an air hammer.
There's a couple of other methods.
If you have an interesting method that we didn't talk about, leave a comment below.
And I hope this video helped you out.