Day 263 – Check your nuts

This has always been a good bit of advice for gentlemen:

But I’m talking about your wheel nuts on your car.

We did a lot of driving on bumpy, poorly maintained, corrugated dirt roads last weekend and I noticed (while washing quite a lot of the Cederberg off the car*) that we were missing a wheel nut. I’m guessing that the prolonged bumps and shakes loosened it to the point of falling off, which it then clearly did. It’s… somewhere out there… waiting for some lucky person to find it: either now, or in the distant future as some sort of industrial fossil.

It’s now been replaced (R111.94 inc VAT for your standard wheel nut, it seems) and as a precaution, I checked the other 23 wheel nuts on my vehicle. While none of them were anywhere near to falling off, I was able to further tighten all 23. Yowzers.

I’ll be checking all my nuts much more regularly in the future. So should you.

 

* “Take only photographs. Leave only footprints. Wow, that’s an awful lot of red sand you’ve also brought back with you.”