Taught my son and myself a valuable lesson today, one I thought I already new. Check and recheck everything when finishing up a job. Will probably end up being relatively costly but no one got hurt and it shouldn’t be to difficult to get it back on the road.
Bought a 4Runner for my son so we could go out together riding some trails. I have a 74 CJ5 I can barely keep on the road as there are constantly issues with it. He currently has a 2wd Tacoma. Bought this 4wd 4Runner and told him we would upgrade as we could to get it trail worthy. First thing was getting all the maintenance up to date. Took it to my go to independent shop and had them do a timing belt, tune up and a few other little things to it. Got it back and found there was another issue with the brake system we needed to deal with. Ordered some parts and actually got that solved today.
It was going to need a couple tires pretty soon and I planned to just stick some new matching ones on there for now and then putting a lift kit and larger tires on it later. We found a great looking set of wheels and tires on Craigslist this week and I went ahead and picked them up. After we got the brake issues fixed today we decided to go ahead and put the new wheels and tires on. Here is where we messed up. Had my 16 year old son doing most the work and I was supervising and checking everything afterward. Several distractions came up during the process from my daughter and my wife.
We finished up and I went back over checking lugs on the passenger side my son had just been working on. He wanted to run over and show my dad his new wheels and tires. My parents live in the next neighborhood over so only a couple miles away. My son calls a few minutes after leaving and says, Dad, your not going to believe this, a tire just came off. It really didn’t register at first, I’m thinking, how can this happen? I checked the lugs, checked and filled as needed all the tires after installing, what could have happened?
After asking a few questions I told my son I was on the way. Threw the jack in my truck along with a lug wrench. Fortunately he made it into my parents neighborhood and was on their street when the wheel fell off. It ended up falling off when he was going around 25mph or so. He probably drove or slid 25 yards or so on the rotor. Ended up wearing at least a 3/4” flat spot on the rotor and bent and wore down the dust shield. Lugs were in rough shape and a couple were loose. Wheel and Tire ended up traveling down the road and took out a mailbox. It was and old 4x4 post and it splintered with the mailbox attached.
We were able to jack the truck up and get the wheel back on temporarily. Pulled a lug each from the other three wheels and mounted the tire/rim. Had to bend the dust shield some to stop the rubbing. Lowered it and put it in gear. Slowly moved forward, turned and backed in a driveway. There was a little noise but it felt solid. By that time my dad was there after driving around looking for lugs. Ended up finding 2 out of the 6 that fell off. Now we needed to try the roughly mile and a half drive home. Made it home pretty easily. Further inspection shows the inner fender liner is trashed from rubbing the tire. The tire also hit the lower fender while falling off and bent it up some separating the fender flare a little. No idea what that is going to take to fix. Will be ordering rotors and pads tonight along with a new drivers side hub.
Lesson learned, check and recheck your work. Even more so when there are distractions around you. First picture shows as we were finishing up mounting the tires/rims. Unfortunately we didn’t take many pictures while we were dealing with the accident. Second is a zoomed in picture where my son was standing where the tire stopped.