I was driving today in my bmw when i saw a 94-96 dodge ram 3500 alongside. When the light turned green, i was driving and then the ram pulled ahead and all of a sudden the front two wheels started wobbling rapidly and both wheels fell off. My question is what caused this to happen? I was pretty scared since I was driving practically right next to it when the wheels fell. It was really weird because I have never seen this happen before.

 

He could have just had his tires changed and the shop that put the wheels back on used an impact gun and stripped the threads out.

 

I've seen it happen to 1 but never 2 - that is weird. I'd go with the striped stud theory

 

could also have been loose lug nuts. The chances of all of the lugs being stripped is not likely.

 

Someone screwed up bigtime!!!

 

probably a front brake job gone bad, well, the job may have been successful, but someone screwed up when putting the wheels back on.

 

it was built by dodge lol

 

Never saw anything like that happen, but did see one right after it happened. Turns out that 3 of his studs broke off in previous tire changes and he never bothered to replace them.

 

Can he spell moron?

About a year ago my bro-inlaw had a '97 dodge 3500 diesel xcab/LB. His wife took it to work one day because it was snowing and her escort wouldn't make it.
On the way home after work, the LF brake rotor split in two! Two weeks later the same thing happened to the other side. He had just replaced the pads about a month prior and the rotors looked fine, no cracks or anything. After that incident he sold that POS. I would have.

 

Yeah, where I am from we have a lot of those "genius'".

 

Bad brake job most likely that had to have the rotors replaced.

If it was DRW then you can not get a normal torque wrench unto the 22/24 mm nuts inside the adapter and the wheel lugs do have to go on at 155 pounds. How I do it is get a 7/8 wrench, cheater bar, and stand on it to make sure the lugs are tight. I had thought about using a crows foot flarenut, but, they usually do not hold up to that kind of pressure unless they are impact and the impact ones do not come that big.

If it was SRW, then most likely someone put the nuts on at 90/100 foot pounds instead of the normal 150-155 foot pounds. You would have to have a pretty big impact gun to strip the threads on the Dodge 3500.

If I had to bet anything if it was a 4x4 after rotor replacement, I would say the hub nut was not torqued on correctly to 175 ft pounds and the cotter pins put in correctly. It can take a good 5-10 minutes to get the cotter pins in correctly and someone may have forgotten or said the heck with it. Bad mistake.