If you bought it used, I’d guess that the front left wheel studs had been replaced at some point.
A gas station guy twisted off two left-handed lugs on a Dodge I used to have.
BTW, just how does clockwise become right? Depending on how the wrench is positioned, looking straight down from above the fastener, you can move the wrench right, left, up, or down to tighten.
The cute lady on the Home Depot commercial says “righty tighty” under the sink, but she’s moving the end of the wrench to her left (clockwise).
Don’t know about Nazis but that was a feature in one of Harry Harrison’s Deathworld books.
The flush handle on your toilet is left-threaded. I watched a plumber crack my toilet by forgetting that little fact.
The main nut that holds the left front wheel drum and bearing on older VW bugs in another example of reverse threads.
This is one of several reasons why I hate Nazis.
Really!? What was he, 17?
Nope. Probably 30s, large, butt crack and all. I couldn’t believe it. I saw him start to reef down on the nut to loosen it, and started to say something, but was too late. The only defense I can see is that when you loosen that nut, you’re working backwards (on a front-flush toilet), so a person could momentarily get confused.
I guess it’s intuitively obvious to most people that the directions “right” and “left” applied to the rotation of an object refer only to the top of the object. They’re actually describing the direction of a notional straight-line tangent to the 12 o’clock point.
But it wasn’t intuitive to me. Because I saw the bottom of a rotating object moving left while the top moved right. I saw both happening at once. Why would it go without saying that directions always reference the top? (insert joke about sexuality topping and bottoming) I always wondered why not say clockwise and counterclockwise? Those are terms useful for rotary systems, as right and left are for linearity. I never got why people want to use a linear term for a rotation. It doesn’t fit as well.
P.S. The woman on the Lowes commercial currently running, who is shown gaining mastery of the “righty tighty” concept, is way hot.
Yeah, leave it up to those pesky Nazis to come up with something like this. Let’s hope some of them forgot about it and contributed to the Darwin awards.
(As noted, normally a “left” turn is understood as counterclockwise.)
I was going to mention this (Lowe’s) commercial, thinking they got it wrong in an ad which is ostensibly about learning how to do things properly, but then I saw it again and it looks like she might have been cranking a downward-facing fitting, which would be a clockwise turn from behind the fitting.
Note the other intuitive concept there, the front and back. The front of the screw, nut, or fitting is the side that moves toward the fixed piece as it is driven or tightened. (This means that screw heads are in the back, but I’ve never noticed that to confuse anybody.)
Hey, I get to show off by starting a sentence with “Welllll, when I was hang-gliding in the Swiss Alps…” … there was one hang-glider which had all the fittings “backwards”. The Swiss were blaming the English for that. Is there a Brit preference for “Righty-Loosey”?
I did, and yeah, that’s the conclusion I came to. it was a RWD truck so it was probably done with a new brake rotor.
Found out the hard way when I tried to change a left front flat on my '56 Pontiac. Wrestled with it for a while, then I seemed to vaguely remember backward threads…sure 'nuff, it worked.
The flip side of this is when people try to describe the sense of a helix as “clockwise” or “counterclockwise”. One of the physics labs here is on electromagnetic induction, and the students have to describe which way their solenoid coil is wound. One of these days, I’ll figure out a way to ask that question that the students can actually understand, and understand why “clockwise” isn’t an answer to the question.
My kid’s water pens (you screw off the tip to refill the reservoir with water) are reverse threaded. Every time I have to refill one, I stand there for about five minutes trying to unscrew it the wrong way. It’s like I’ve suddenly turned into Homer Simpson.
Maybe it’s so a slightly older kid who’s worked out normal unscrewing can’t open the pen and dump the water everywhere.
Underground Valves in the Water Industry are almost always reverse-threaded. I am not entirely sure why that would be, but all the valves on the grounds of the five plants where I’ve worked were that way.
And even after all these years, I still need to use the “Right-Hand Rule” to remind myself when tightening or loosening bolts, screws or whatever. RHR: curl the fingers of your right hand in the direction you are turning the screw (or whatever) and your extended thumb points in the direction it will advance.
Because you weren’t looking at it from the object’s point of view, and you were privileging a certain direction as “up”!
From the point of view of a person standing on the rotating object, the counter-clockwise direction is a left turn, and the clockwise direction is right.
Consider a person running around the block. If she is running clockwise, she will make 4 right turns. If she is running clockwise in a circle, she will be turning right continuously. If she is standing on a (very large) nut that is being turned clockwise using an enormous wrench, she will experience this as being turned to the right.
This terminology is used in aviation. If a pilot is flying a clockwise pattern (circuit), this is called a “right-hand circuit”, because all of the turns are right turns.
So the relationship between “clockwise” and “right” is very natural.
The fittings on propane tanks are reversed. I always thought this was so weekend handymen were less likely to blow themselves up with fittings made from random junk.
I’m not 100% sure on that specific case, but things like that are generally standards so you can’t connect the wrong tank of stuff to the wrong equipment; e.g. a propane tank to something expecting natural gas. Oxy-Acetylene torches are like this too; one hose is left-hand thread, the other right-hand so you can’t mix them up.