Finally had enough cash in the car stuff budget to pull the trigger on new shoes for the Miata. The car came with a set of brand-new iMove Ironman Gen2 all-seasons, and they're... not very good. They're fine for everyday driving, but I've taken this car to a couple autocross events now and I can tell the tires have been a major limiting factor there. They're also pretty bad for NVH and performance under wet conditions is noticeably poor even on the street.
So this set of Continental ExtremeContact DWS06 Plus tires should do a lot better. They're still all-seasons, because this car is my daily driver and I don't (yet) have a second set of wheels to put Bridgestone RE71s on, but they should be just about the best I can get under those constraints.
Anyways, when I went down to the tire shop to get them installed, the guy there told me that one of my lug nuts was hard to remove and they weren't going to try and get it back on. Being someone who likes having all their lug nuts attached correctly, this irked me.
Still, it's not their job to fix my lug studs, and I figured 19 out of 20 was good enough to get me back home. I tried threading on the offending lug nut, and sure enough it got about 5mm down the stud and jammed up.
Now, it's not incredibly difficult to replace a stud, but I figured I might as well try just chasing the threads and see if that got me back on the road any quicker. I've never actually had a reason to take a wheel off before, but nothing about the job seemed particularly complicated.
Up close, the bad stud looks pretty bad. There's a lot of crud on it, and if you look closely the threads are pretty worn down near the top. I'll have to get the wheel off to get better access.
I have a real floor jack, but I don't have the rubber pad thingie you're supposed to use when jacking up a car on the pinch weld, and this car wants you to jack it up on the pinch weld. I do have the scissor jack that came with the car, which, uh, is not the scissor jack that came with the car. For some reason a previous owner saw fit to put the OEM jack from a Subaru BRZ in there. Works fine, though. Good to know I'll be able to use that in a pinch to install the spare tire this car doesn't have.
With that out of the way, I can go ahead and pull the wheel off. The boot on this strut looks great. I'm not gonna do anything about that because I want to put new shocks on here eventually anyways.
The stud in question looks a lot better cleaned up, but the nut still doesn't thread onto it.
So it's time to hit it with the die. The stud is a M12 x 1.5 thread, which is the largest size I have in my tap and die set. The other studs are getting in the way of my die stock, so I had to bust out Grandpa's old Crescent wrench (and I can call it that, because it really is).
That went on fine, and it managed to knock a couple burrs off the thread. It's probably a little thinned-out now, but I figure if it works, it works.
Sure enough, the lug nut threads on fine now.
I made sure to clock the wheel so that I can remember which stud is the problem one (it's mounted so it's opposite the valve stem) and I'm going to check it every couple hundred miles until I'm satisfied it's not at risk of backing off. I figure if that thread can't stand up to 95 foot-pounds I'll find out one way or the other.
Well, with that finally done I'm real excited for next time I make it out to the track. I've been setting some truly horrid times out there despite more experienced people telling me that it seems I'm doing about the right things with the car, so I figure I'm within my rights to call it a setup issue. Not having to choose between going too wide around the corner, drifting around the corner, or slowing down so far I get out of the powerband should help a lot.
