Are you in the situation where your wheel is rusted on? You need to take it off, and you have removed all the lug nuts, but it just won’t budge? You’ve kicked it repeatedly, but nothing?
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This is a fairly common problem, and I intend to give you the method you need to remove the wheel in cases like this.
Method 1: Sledge Hammer
The first step is to jack up the vehicle and remove the lug nuts. Put some jack stands under it for safety purposes.
The reason that kicking the tire doesn’t work, is that the force of the kick is just pushing the tire ONTO the hub more. what you need to do is give a large amount of force from the BACK side of the tire.
To do this, lay down on the ground with your head under the vehicle, and your feet sticking out, and take a sledge hammer. You are going to whack the bottom of the tire, OUTWARD, away from the vehicle. You are hitting the rubber part of the tire. This is very important! Please do not hit the rim! This will damage the rim and it will not be a good situation. The key here is that the force on the tire is going outward away from the vehicle, not toward the vehicle.
Give the tire a couple of good whacks outward. If it doesn’t pop off, rotate the tire a 1/4 of a turn and repeat the process. Continue rotating and whacking until the tire comes off. Usually, it will come off after the first couple of whacks and won’t require rotating the tire, but for very stubborn tires, you may also need to rotate.
Method 2: Extreme Cases
Occasionally there are more extreme cases, where the wheel just will not budge. In these cases, desperate times call for desperate measures. This method is almost guaranteed to get the wheel loose, so there is hope. This one is a little more dangerous, however, so take care when executing this method. It can also potentially damage the stud threads a bit, so don’t loosen the lugs too far.
The first step is to loosen the lug nuts on the wheel that you want to take off. Loosen them, but do not completely remove them. Loosen them about 1/2 to 1 full turn or so. With everyone standing clear, get in the vehicle and start it up. Pull the car forward about 10 feet, then stop and put the car in reverse and go about 10 feet. Repeat this back and forth several times.
Then turn off the car and jack it up and check for looseness of the wheel. You may need to repeat method 1.
Prevention
A piece of advice, when you are done with whatever it is you are doing with the tire off, put some anti-seize compound on the mating surface, so that you don’t have this problem next time.
Here’s a photo showing some anti-seize smeared onto the front rotor in order to help eliminate this problem from happening.
Alright, well that’s about it. I hope this helped and you were able to get that stubborn wheel off!
Practical Mechanic 