And I thought that had only happened to me - Story Below
I'm heading back from a children's museum that I was doing some volunteer
work for as part of my high school graduation requirements when I feel what
I thought was a rear tire going down. For the SEROCers this happened on
I-59 at the S curves where 59 meets I-20 just north of the airport in B'ham.
Almost immediately I get this horrendous vibration that really startled me.
It probably only took about a 1/2 second to realize the left rear was coming
off the car - at 65 mph in the middle of three lanes. There was a guy in
some old domestic sled coming up from behind on the right but I didn't have
time to let him pass so I cut over to the shoulder and as I did, the left
rear made it's move. The car dropped on to the brake drum while I watched
the tire bounce around directly behind in the mirror. It landed I the
shoulder about 100 feet behind where I came to a stop. I'd suffered some
minor body damage and a flat spotted brake drum. So much for those aluminum
fins. One day I'll replace that one.
Turns out that the clowns who had mounted my new set of Dunlop's and had
talked me into new lug nuts figured that all Datsun's have metric wheel
studs so they managed to find a metric stud that would thread and take a
little torque. These loosened and came off. The next dilemma was that I
only carried a small bottle jack with me and since the leaf spring was way
too close to the ground to get the jack under it I had to jack it on the
rear frame member. The bottle jack didn't have enough extension to raise
the hub far enough off of the ground to get the spare wheel on. What now?
A pair of cops drove past but didn't acknowledge me. Finally this huge
black guy (had to be 6'5" 250lbs) in a county truck stops. I tell him what
happened and he says he's got a jack in the back of his Suburban. It looks
like an Abbot and Costello routine as he's tossing all sorts of crap around
in the back of the truck. He comes back and says "I can't find the jack...
It's a little car. Why don't we just pick it up." He then proceeds to grab
hold of the rear bumper and dead lift the car thigh high. I quickly
compressed the jack and stuck it under another spot at which I could get it
high enough to put the spare on. I shook the man's hand and headed home
stopping several times to check the other lugs as I kept feeling the wheels
get loose (they weren't - I was paranoid).
Brian
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