Suppose you are enjoying a road trip with your friends and family and suddenly your joy comes to a stop with one tire of your vehicle getting punctured. In such a case, usually you will choose to remove the tire altogether, replace it with the spare one and then continue with your journey. To remove your punctured tire and replace it with a new one, generally a Stephanie is provided in the car. But to be really honest and practical, using a Stephanie to remove the lug nuts can really be a cumbersome task. In such cases, using an impact wrench to remove the lug nuts can be much easier.
An impact wrench is basically a power tool that can be used to loosen up the lug nuts from the tires of trucks, cars and other vehicles. They can also be used effectively in any high-torque situations as well. As compared to an impact driver that has a ¼ inch hex opening, an impact wrench that comes up with ½ inch sockets of various sizes can serve to be more effective especially when it comes to fitting and removing the lug nuts of a wheel.
How to use an impact wrench for loosening and tightening lug nuts?
Using up an impact wrench is pretty simple. You just need to follow up the given steps.
First you need to fit a deep socket to the end of your impact wrench.
Then you have to put some oil in the air inlet of the impact wrench.
Now, you have to get your hose attached to the end of the impact wrench.
Then you have to turn the regulator of the compressor to around 90 PSI.
Before pulling off the lug nuts, make sure that your impact wrench’s lever is in the reverse position.
Once you get this done, you can apply it to your lug nuts and pull them off by starting up the impact wrench.
Now, when you are putting the lug nuts back into the wheels, you have to put them in their respective positions first.
To tighten up the lug nuts, you need to use the torque sticks in combination with your impact wrench. You need to make sure that you tighten the lug nuts with their specified foot pounds.
Then you need to take the respective torque stick and plug it into your impact wrench.
Finally you have to set the lever of your impact wrench to the forward position and then you can proceed with tightening up your lug nuts.
Initially impact wrenches were being used as pneumatic-powered tools. They were in resemblance to the types that are popularly used on pit roads in the events of auto races. When it comes to professional garages, impact wrenches are used commonly. They are characterized by their loud whirring noise. But with improvements in the field of technology, impact wrenches these days are built with specifications that make them suitable to be used by regular people as well. The cordless 18V impact wrench provides you with the kind of power that can be used effectively to loosen up the lug nuts that have been tightened at 100 feet of torque. However, you must make sure that while using an impact wrench you should wear hearing protection devices because impact wrenches are extremely loud.
In an impact wrench, a huge amount of torque gets produced. This happens owing to a hammering mechanism in the tool which delivers stronger and continuous blows rapidly. If you use an impact wrench to loosen up a lug nut, you will see that the socket that is attached to the impact wrench moves slowly when the lug nut is loosening up and moves quickly when the lug nut is completely loosened up. You should be careful when you are tightening up the lug nuts using an impact wrench. With an impact wrench, many a time while tightening up the lug nuts, they get over torqued. In such cases, the threads can get stretched or stripped.
In order to remove the lug nuts of your vehicle, a standard lug wrench or a stephanie can be used effectively too, but if you are looking out for convenience and speed while changing tires you should opt-out for an impact wrench.
After going through this article, we expect that you would have cleared your ambiguities regarding the use of an impact wrench. If you have any other doubts, let us know about them in the comment section, we will provide you all kinds of information. Also do not forget to share your views on this article. Your feedback is always significant to us and plays an important role in providing a validation to our work. Thanks for reading.
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