Loosen Lug Nuts to Fix a Flat Tire

Series Summary

It's happened to almost all of us: A flat tire on the road. Regardless of where you are when it happens, getting a flat tire is a terrible inconvenience and can be an awful experience. So when it does happen, do you know what to do? Do you know how to fix a flat tire? Being confident with tire repair is essential for drivers to stay safe save money. If you don't know how to fix or plug a flat tire, it is easy to learn with good instruction. In fact, this is the right place to learn about repairing a flat tire. In this free how-to video series, learn how to fix a flat tire from auto repair expert Mitch Jones. Jones will show you how to locate your tire-removal equipment, how to loosen lug nuts on your wheel, how to jack up your car and more. You will also learn how to find the puncture in a flat tire, remove the material that cut the tire, and use a sealant to fix up the tire secure enough for a drive to the auto shop.

Video Transcript

"Now we are going to change the tire, loosen the lug nuts is the first step but also you want to figure out what sort of lug nuts you have. Some vehicles may have your regular traditional, you know, hex style nut. That's just your basic factory standard low locking tool, low locking fastener. But then in some cases you know with the thing of custom wheels and alloy wheels they put on vehicles you may have one lug nut or all of them may have a locking device on them. So you may end up with tools like this to take the lug nuts off. You may have an old fashioned one, you may have the regular hex head. And some of them actually fit over a specially designed lug nut itself to keep people from stealing your wheels and so on and so forth. So what you want to do is find the proper tool, some people use the cross bar or you can use the regular tool that comes in the vehicle itself, so what you want to do is have the weight of the vehicle on the ground so that you can loosen the wheel from the vehicle. It takes a good amount of strength to take the lug nut apart off of the car. It usually takes a good amount of strength to bite the lug nut loose from the wheel on the vehicle because if you take it to a repair shop obviously they use an impact gun to put them on. So what you want to do is get your tool out and then, it's usually simple once you get the right amount of leverage, the leverage is the key. So you loosen them all up and then that in turn is how you start your changing of the wheel."