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After about five hours en route from Alabama to Virginia, and 20 minutes before reaching our intended destination for the night, Bob glanced in the right rearview mirror and noticed something flapping on the trailer. He suspected it was our recently replaced tire fender.

He gently pulled off to the side of the freeway, and we got out to investigate. I was flabbergasted when I saw an entire tire missing. “The tire,” was all I could say as I pointed at where it should have been. Our tire pressure monitoring system hadn’t alerted us to any issue with the tire like it had every other time there was a problem. 

I went to grab the spare tire crank to lower the spare from its nesting spot under the underbelly, but Bob stopped me. “The whole wheel’s gone,” he announced. “It sheered off the studs.”
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That meant there was no way to attach the spare tire. Tagalong had lost an entire wheel on the freeway. I had seen videos of tires separating from cars and rolling down the road and thought, “How could that happen?” Now here we were in that reality.

Making a plan

“What do we do?” we wondered aloud. We both remained calm and talked through the possibilities. We were at an exit. Maybe we could nurse the rig off the freeway. I quickly searched for tire shops in the area. The first two hits weren’t open until Monday. It was 8:30 on a Friday night. We didn’t want to be stuck in Kingsport, Tennessee, for the weekend if we could help it. 

I found a Discount Tire about 20 minutes away that was closed but opened Saturday morning at 8. We definitely needed a tire, but could they fix the issue with the missing studs?

While I removed the broken fender, Bob tried to ratchet up the dangling axle to make the trek a little less strenuous on our rig, a trick we had learned when moving our three-tired fifth wheel after our freeway fire a year and a half earlier. The weathered ratchet strap snapped. 

We did another Google search and found an auto parts store a little closer, but it closed at 9 p.m. It was around 8:40. We called to make sure the store would stay open for us because we really needed a stronger ratchet strap. The gentleman on the other end of the phone assured me he’d wait. 

Moving the crippled rig

With emergency flashers on, we cautiously towed the trailer over hilly Tennessee roads to reach the store, pulling in just before 9. A car was trying to exit as we entered, forcing us to hug the side more than we would have liked. A loud scraping noise made us cringe. We had dragged the trailer’s mid-stabilizer and naked tire hub over the curb, bending the stabilizer. We’d have to deal with that later.

We found two ratchet straps that could work. Not sure which would be best, we bought both. Bob ratched up the dangling axle while store clerks looked on, amazed to see our tire hub with sheered studs. 
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With that done, we canvassed the parking lot to determine the easiest way out. Pleased with our plan, we loaded into the truck, once again turned on the emergency flashers, and slowly navigated to Discount Tire. We had examined the satellite view of the parking lot and were glad we were arriving at night to avoid other cars in the way.

Bob parked us behind the building. A worker from another Discount Tire store saw some activity (us) in the parking lot and pulled in to make sure everything was OK. We chatted with him, and he examined our tire hub. He told us he’d let the store manager know we were staying the night and went on his way.
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Counting our blessings

It was 10 p.m., and we hadn’t eaten since grabbing a snack at our last fuel stop many hours earlier. We searched for an open restaurant within walking distance and found a wings place. As we devoured delicious wings, we reflected on our circumstances, seeing God’s hand over us throughout the ordeal and counting our many blessings:

  1. Our incident happened late, after rush hour. 
  2. It occurred outside of busy Chattanooga but near a town with resources.
  3. It took place on a Friday night, making it possible for us to get help on Saturday. Had it happened on a Saturday night, we would have been stuck until at least Monday.
  4. We knew that ratcheting up the axle to move the rig could work, as we had done the same thing after our freeway fire prevented us from attaching the spare tire.
  5. We found a store within walking distance that had the exact replacement hub we needed in stock. 
  6. The departed tire hadn’t taken the entire fender off, or we may not have noticed for quite some time. Gulliver didn’t care about the missing tire. He would have kept pulling the trailer even if it had no tires.

With our bellies full, we returned to our rig for the night, keeping all the slideouts closed to avoid putting extra strain on the lone tire on the passenger side. 

Getting a rude awakening

We awoke the next morning to a blaring horn sounding multiple times. It seemed the Discount Tire employees hadn’t been notified by their manager of our presence there. We dressed quickly, and Bob went out to talk to a worker. Although the guys at the store could provide us with a wheel and tire, they couldn’t help us with the hub.

We walked across the street to Target in search of breakfast, then walked to FleetPride to secure a replacement hub. We’d need to get that on the rig before we could get a new tire. 

Although the FleetPride door said the store was open from 8 to noon on Saturdays and it was 8:20 a.m., the store was closed. As we sat on the sidewalk outside the store, Bob called the store number. He got a recording that said FleetPride had merged with TruckPro. I remembered seeing a TruckPro in the area when searching for a tire shop. 

We called TruckPro and found it was open and also had the hub in stock, but it wasn’t within walking distance. 

Retracing our tire tracks

We returned to our rig, disconnected the truck from it, and drove to TruckPro. We got the hub and a few things we needed with it, such as the dust cap and rear grease seal. Since TruckPro was near where we exited the freeway, we decided to retrace our tire tracks to see if we could find our runaway tire. 

We searched a 5-mile stretch and found a few tires, but none attached to wheels. We hoped that ours had rolled into a ravine, away from other vehicles.

Replacing the hub and tire

We visited another auto parts store to pick up a seal puller tool and then headed back to the rig. Bob detached the problem hub and attached the new one, following the same procedure he had when repacking the bearings a month earlier. I lowered the spare tire from the trailer and dragged it out from under. 
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Because Discount Tire didn’t have a tire in stock that matched our trailer tires, we decided to have the workers put the spare tire on the rig, and we bought a replacement spare and wheel. They had one tire model and one wheel the size we needed, making that decision easy.

The Discount Tire guys put the spare on the new hub, but we didn’t have lug nuts to hold it in place. We lost those with the tire. Discount Tire sells lug nuts in sets of 24. Because our trailer tires have eight lugs each, we would have had to purchase two sets. The tech working on our tire said not to worry about it and gave us eight. Another blessing.
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Another worker attached the new tire under the rig, torqued the lug nuts on the former spare (now our fourth tire), and we were on our way, 16 hours and $600 after the incident happened. Because it had occurred at night, we only lost three to four hours of travel time.
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Finding the cause

While I drove, Bob researched possible causes, something that had kept him from sleeping well the night before. He learned that when lugs sheer off, it’s typically due to undertorqued lug nuts. 

Thinking back to when we had replaced the bearings on that tire, we remembered it was the last tire we worked on, at the end of a long, hot day. We were overheated, exhausted, dehydrated, and hungry. Had we properly torqued those lug nuts? We’re not sure. 

If Bob had been in that condition when working on an aircraft, he would stop, not wanting to risk making a mistake. We should have taken that same approach when working on the trailer tires, as they’re certainly a safety item. That’s a vital lesson learned. 

We also learned that our torque wrench was overtorquing by 9.5 pounds. Fortunately, the Discount Tire guys retorqued all our trailer tires, giving us confidence that we wouldn’t experience another issue like we had. 

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