From: Mel Snyder

This is going to get the two of you laughing and slapping your foreheads like nothing you've seen or heard in a LONG time. I would bet it is one of the strangest stories submitted to Car Talk since the woman whose horse ate her steering wheel.

I was pulling into the local Stop 'n Shop in Old Saybrook, CT last week, and noticed a gray-haired lady standing beside her 2005 Lexus SUV, shouting into her cellphone and stomping her foot angrily. You know the "madder than a wet hen" analogy? — this hen was dry and madder!

I decided to see if I could help, so I stopped ahead of her vehicle. As I walked back, I heard her shouting into her phone, to Lexus road service I later learned, "What do you mean you can't help me? My car's been vandalized! Someone stuck a knife into my tire when I was shopping!"

I bent over to look at her right rear tire, and was shocked to see what was sticking out.

Not a knife handle, as she thought, but the rusty handle of an 8-inch drop-forged adjustable wrench! And it hadn't been stuck in from the outside — it was clearly coming from the inside OUT!

Officer Mercer of the Old Saybrook police department pulled up. I approached him, and suggested he prepare himself for a very weird sight. His reaction was the same as mine. I whipped out my cellphone and snapped this shot, and he got the digital camera from his cruiser and did the same.

Otherwise, no one would believe us.

Clearly, someone left or put the wrench into the tire before it was mounted. The woman swears she bought the car new in 2005, and that the tire had never been removed from the SUV or serviced. I cannot think of any earthly reason why an 8-inch adjustable wrench would be anywhere near the tire. I suppose that, after 2 years, even a new wrench might get rusty from oxygen and moisture within the tire.

While I cannot explain how the wrench got into the tire, I can theorize how it ended up getting forced through the tire sidewall.

At highway speeds, the loose wrench was probably spun by centrifugal force to the inner surface of the tread. But at some point, probably while driving at very low speeds, like pulling into a parking space, the wrench dropped just right, so the business end caught in the inner side of the tread, and the handle was perfectly perpendicular to the inner sidewall surface. As the tire rolled forward, pressure on the tread was sufficient to force the handle through the sidewall.

Certainly, this was a rare event — but so is the presence of a wrench inside a tire. The woman who owned the car claimed Lexus service wouldn't come to her aid because the car hadn't failed, it was vandalized. If in fact this was a new car, and the tire had never been serviced, one would have to question what's going on in the vehicle prep area at the Lexus dealer who sold her the vehicle... or in the Toyota plant where the SUV was built.

Mel Snyder
Westbrook, CT