Ah, the spindle nut: it is among the most derided nuts in all of nut-dom. This little one on a Honda single-handedly destroyed (nearly) every tool with which its owner tried to remove it.
The spindle nut connects your halfshaft to your wheel hub, and often looks like a rusty, crusty mess sitting at the center of your brake rotor. And getting the damned thing off, as proven by Redditer ItsDijital’s horror story, is a perilous endeavor meant to destroy human souls.
ItsDijital decided to replace the clutch on his Honda, and one of the first steps was removing the CV axles from the transmission. To do that, he had to remove the big, honkin’ 36mm spindle nut shown above.
So ItsDijital did what any wrencher in the northeast would do: he hit that rusty nut with some PB Blaster penetrating lubricant and a Mapp torch, and then put a huge breaker bar on it.
After yanking on that breaker bar, this happened:
Okay, so a cheap-o Harbor Freight tool broke; go figure. But ItsDijital was sure a Craftsman breaker bar would get the job done. I mean, sure, they’re all made in China these days, but it’s a Craftsman. It must be good.
Yeah, well, not good enough. As ItsDijital so eloquently put it, both his breaker bars were “mercilessly decapitated.”
Okay, but enough of this child’s play. ItsDijital realized it was time to break out the air tools—in this case, a Craftsman half-inch impact gun.
It didn’t work as planned, as ItsDigijital writes he “Slammed the shit out of it, but [was] forced to retreat in the end.”
Well damn. Two breaker bars down and an impact gun that could only slam a few shits out of something that required many shits slammed.
So ItsDijital went up to a 3/4-inch drive breaker bar. Or, as he wrote in his post, a “3/4" knight in shining chromed vanadium steel.” And yet somehow, even that heavy-duty chunk of steel was no match for the Chuck Norris of rusty spindle nuts.
So now he’s got four tools either broken, bent or just too damn weak to move the rusty nut from hell. It’s not going well.
That’s when this wrencher went online and bought a “1" drive 6000 lb-ft god...to avenge the fallen.” It’s a torque multiplier, and it’s an absolute beast that you could probably use it to spin a tunnel boring machine and drill a hole straight through a mountain with your bare hands.
But ItsDijital didn’t need to spin a tunnel boring machine, all he had to do was remove a small nut. And for that torque multiplier, the task was child’s play:
I’d almost feel bad for this guy if the result of his pain hadn’t been this ridiculously hilarious post on imgur, which the author then shared on Reddit.
Thank you ItsDijital for suffering for our amusement. But I’m glad you finally got it done, because your clutch wasn’t looking so hot: