What is a Wheel Lock Key?

What in the world is a Wheel Lock Key?

Welcome to Mercie J, where compassion and craftsmanship come together, I'm Rick Smith. So first of all let's start by talking about what holds your wheels on. Most vehicles use nuts on the wheels, it's just a standard hex shaped item that a socket goes over. Some use a bolt which is basically the same thing, it has a hex. On some cars we have what's called splines and so instead of a socket, it's a series of spines and we have a special socket that slides over. Once again, that's a universal thing.

Then we have what are called locks and those are special nuts or bolts that have a specific pattern to them and a regular socket won't work. Sometimes we might have them on every single wheel. Sometimes we might have them on every single nut. The advantage to them is that we can make it a little more difficult for a thief to steal the wheel. The disadvantage is technicians will oftentimes forget to put these back. So they typically are in your glove box or in your console or by your jack.

If you want to help the technician always take it out when you get to the shop and I have a little tip for you technicians out there. After the second time I left one of these on top of my toolbox and I had to embarrassingly call the customer, I started pulling a little something out of the glove box setting it on the driver seat so I couldn't road test the car without putting this in.

So I'm going to show you real quickly what this looks like hopefully it comes out on the camera really well, and so it is not a regular socket it looks more like a shape so hopefully you saw it in both cameras there. I hope this has been informational to you on what these wheel locks are, thanks for watching and until next time, safe travel and blessings to you.