The high-voltage battery fan has been successfully cleaned

You are talking about the wheel lug nuts?
"Lefty loosey, righty tighty"

 

Sometimes it works to get the lug wrench out of the back and jump up and down on it. If you have an impact wrench, you can use that. Sometimes it's easier to just go to a tire shop and have them use their tools to get the stuff loose.

The best way to develop your sense of the force to apply is to own a torque wrench and set it to the torque that is specified for the wheel nuts, and use it to tighten the nuts until they are tight enough.

After you've done that a decent number of times, you'll have a kind of muscle memory of what the right torque feels like. (You can also just keep using the torque wrench; once you've got it, it's no extra trouble, and there'll be no mistakes.)

 

Oh, in the second part of your question, you were still trying to loosen the nuts? You wrote "when I used all my strength to tighten" them but you may have meant to write 'loosen'?

Yes, as long as you have double-checked that you are using the lug wrench in the loosening direction (counterclockwise), then go ahead and apply as much force as it takes. Often it will work to orient the lug wrench handle straight off to the left and kick downward on it, stand on it and bounce, and so on. A longer handle reduces the force needed, but the supplied lug wrench is rather short.

Creaking noises are quite common as the nuts begin to come loose, and are not a cause for concern.

When I reinstall those nuts, I use a very minimal, strategic application of an anti-seize compound. I do not use any on the threads, and I do not use any where the nut contacts the wheel. However the nut (the original Toyota nut for aluminum wheels, anyway) has a captive flat washer, and I sneak about a pinhead-sized dab of anti-seize between the washer and nut. Makes future tightening and loosening more civilized.

 

I got used to using a breaker bar and a torque wrench, so I keep a 350 mm pipe that fits over the wheel wrench in with the wheel jack, just so I don't have to invoke my superhuman strength.

 

For the OP located in Cambodia, that translates to: ask people nearby if they have length of pipe that will fit over the handle of the tool that came with the car. Extending the handle provides more torque. There is always the chance that the tire shop put it on so hard, or the lug nut has rusted in place, so that the torque to destroy the nut or socket is lower than the torque needed to unscrew the nut. Don't worry about that, if it happens you were never going to get that nut off anyway.

As dolj notes, carrying a better tool in your own car for taking off the lug nuts is a good idea. The manufacturer supplied tools tend to be pretty marginal. For instance, the handles are too short for many people. The tools seem to have been designed under the assumption that the person using it would be a muscular male weighing 100 kg. That is, a person who doesn't need a long lever arm to deliver the needed amount of torque. People who are old, light, or not very muscular frequently cannot remove lug nuts with the car's tool.

For maintaining your own car you want to have a torque wrench and a set of sockets. Any time a shop has put the wheels on retorque the lug nuts. Doing one wheel at a time, tighten in a star pattern, and then torque the lug nuts to specification. That goes a long way towards being able to remove them on the side of the road.

Also, be sure the car has something in the trunk to chock the wheels. The manufacturers jacks are not very stable (often only 2 cm wide) and it is easy to roll the car forward or backward off the jack. Work gloves are a good idea too.

 

Just to clarify my post, I got used to using a breaker bar and a torque wrench when working on my car at home, so I keep a 350 mm pipe that fits over the wheel wrench to extend it. I keep this extension pipe in the spare wheel well with the wheel jack. I do not want my torque wrench, or my breaker bar and socket in the car, as I do not want the situation where I need the tools and the car is away from home.

For OP, you do not want to be doing up the lug nut 'with all your might' when using the extension. As ChapmanF said in his post, the way to develop the muscle memory to know what 103 Nm (76 ft-lbs) torque feels like is to use a torque wrench to tighten the lug nuts. Then use the car's wheel wrench with the extension to tighten a lug so it moves ever so slightly. In the absence of the correct tools, such as being stuck on the side of the road, you can also use the effort to loosen the lug nuts as a guide, although there are numerous caveats to this method, and it relies on all things being equal. You can use this method as a stopgap measure to get to your tools and then redo it to the correct torque.

 

Something like this, jammed under both sides of the wheel diagonally opposite the corner being raised:



@Felix1414 : the difficulty removing the wheel is most likely due to someone installing the nuts way too tight, often with a high power impact wrench. Perhaps you can talk to the mechanic, caution them that the correct torque is 76 pound-feet.

 

Even a mediocre-power impact wrench will get the nuts way too tight, if used on them directly.

What many tire places (are supposed to) do is use a "torque stick" between the impact wrench and the socket. These are like socket extensions with a known amount of springy twist; they come in different colors for different torque needs, and at the designated torque they just sit there and absorb the impacts from the wrench.

The place I've been using does the initial tightening with an air wrench and torque stick (for a torque a bit lower than the spec), and then tightens to the final spec using a torque wrench by hand.

They used to insist on setting their torque wrench for 80 ft lb instead of 76 though. I asked them and they showed me someone had put 80 in their computers as the spec for a Prius, and because it was in their computers it 'has to be right'.

But at least the difference between 76 and 80 isn't likely to break anything or make them hard to take off.

 

Agree. Watching South Main Auto, he's using a very fancy looking digital torque wrench: he'll set it to value, then start torquing, and a row of red/orange LED's light up in sequence, and finally a green one with a beep, to indicate he's achieved the torque. He'll often read the displayed value, and it's invariably overshot, 5 or or more pound-feet. In other words, not an exact science.

 

Unfortunately pretty much all electronic beeps in tools and measuring devices are made by a piezoelectric transducer at a frequency which is now down many many dB in my hearing response curve. I can still hear some of them if my ear is right on the device, but as a practical matter, they are all now useless to me. Problem also with my portable alarm clock and the alarm in my wristwatch. Luckily click type torque wrenches are still audible, and can be felt as well as heard, and beam type ones are also still useful. The continuity mode in multimeters are all like this too, but at least those one can just set it to the resistance mode and look at that instead.

There are a few exceptions, thankfully. For instance, I have a cheap flammable gas detector that makes a raucous sound, something like a Geiger counter being imitated by a square wave oscillator, which is easy to hear still.

 

LIke any other measurement in science, how close you get to 'exact' is something you decide, according to how close your purposes need you to get, and what your instrumentation budget can afford.

 

Get one of these and it will make loosening lug nuts much easier.



It allows both hands to be effectively used and can be stepped on if necessary. No power tool needed. $16 US or less.



For the best leverage get the 18" version for $21.