Art & Inspiration Why You Should Do Your Own Work

If I need to outsource any of my work, which is very little, I just find a reliable shop with a good reputation and one with an older more experienced crew....

Have always followed manufacturers instructions on adding loctite or not and never had a problem.

...

 

Ford had a problem with gland nuts coming loose on some backhoe cylinders. Rather than adding a setscrew with a nylon insert to bear against the threads, or a dutch screw, both of which are relatively common on cylinders, they just increased the torque spec on the nut from around 400 ft-lb to 1400 ft-lb. Easy enough for Ford, but pure hell for anyone trying to remove the gland nut to pack a cylinder.

 

What, you don't have a 10-foot cheater bar on hand? 1,400 ft-lbs is wild.

 

I agree if the parts are engineered for thread locker and it is applied properly, it is ok to use. But, in those cases if they read the torque specs it will state what to use, how to use it, and what to torque it to when using it. A paid shop should follow the manufacturer’s procedures when working on vehicles. And they say nothing about torque seal. I believe in this case they intentionally put either red or the green on the bolts to create a future problem. While they were trying to run the bill up by saying things wouldn’t work, I went to the shop and spent about 10 min. on 3 separate occasions to show them how to do the task they said couldn’t be done. They called me while I was on my way to pick up the truck and claimed it wouldn’t be done as they needed to pull the drive shaft back out and send it off to have it balanced. I said leave it, I’ll pull it myself and send it, if it needs it. The bolts should. Be torqued to a max of 90 lbs/ft. The bolts are not coming out without a lot of heat and pressure. Cutting torch on the bolts and over 300 lbs/ft of force and they might come loose. Front ones are off, back ones are fighting and not budging even when cherry red. Fall back plan is cut the bolt heads off and pull the entire mounting plate off the front of the differential. I do have a spare rear end with another plate. But, again this is why I should have waited and done it myself. At least if it wasn’t right, it would be my own fault.

 

There is no difference in thread design with or without thread locker.

 

Personally when my car gets F-ed up I want the to be the F-er upper

 

Yeah! Me TOO. And I do that frequently, it seems.

Ben

 

Google Place bolts
https://wilsongarner.com/what-is-a-self-locking-bolt-and-how-does-it-work/

 

Don't need to as I have a box of Ford ones on hand here! I've also used the nylon ones in the past (marine work).

 

Guessing uv never worked on a harley.

 

Hard tail with a knucklehead didn’t use thread locker in the 70s. I quit riding in 79 and by the time I thought about it, I had screwed up my back and the vibration would make my leg(s) go numb. Decided I wasn’t buying a new bike only to dump it at a stop light when I couldn’t feel my legs to hold it up. Which almost happened during the rider course with their Buell in 2006.

 

Ben

 

Vibration?
What vvvvviiiibbbbbbbrrrrrrrraaaaaaaatttttttiiiiiiioooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnn?

 

Lets be honest here. To own a Harley is to work on a Harley just like to own a Hot Rod...... You either get it or you don't.
Update on the original source of this thread. I did get the bolts out finally on the drive shaft. Had to use the cutting torch to heat them up. 6 came out after heating them to 600 deg f. 1 took 2 heat cycles and shocking the heck out of it with a hammer and then hitting it with the 3/4 impact. The last one stripped the ridges off the 12 point bolt head on the first heat cycle. Wound up grinding the head off. Prying the flange loose, and then dressing the remaining bolt so I could thread a nut on it. Welded the nut to it and it came right off after I got done welding the nut on high heat. I found blue, and red on all the nuts and the two problem nuts showed signs of green and blue. I was not impressed. And they were coated top to bottom. The new ones came with a small dab of red on them. Chased the threads (not tapped) and had no problems at all hitting the proper torque.

 

Ha ha...Spending most of my life on old harleys I use loctite mainly on fasteners that I believe will see more vibration on my car. I very rarely use the red loctite though, just the removable types blue, green or purple stuff. That red loctite does require high heat to remove it. Learned my lesson long ago with that on the engine sprocket on one of my harleys.

As for doing your own work...I always do my own if it is within my capabilities or a challenge I can take on and learn from.

 

Any thing in my pay grade I will work on : from pregnant whore to a basketball game .

 

I've been working on a '33 coupe that was a home built car....aka they did all their own work. Mind you this was a couple owners ago. It's a pretty decently built car but...the whole thing was put together with whatever hardware they had laying around (different length bolts, mix of grade 5 and 8, some metric thrown in too) and I guess they didn't have any lock washers (or flat washers for that matter) because almost every nut I've taken off was installed with red loctite. Guess my point is even when someone is doing "their own work", I'm often skeptical.

 

Reading a copy of Carroll Smith's book, Nuts, Bolts, Fasteners and Plumbing will answer a lot of questions for many of you on here!

 

How long ago was it built?

Ben

 

Thread should be why or why shouldn't you do your work lol.

 

I’m the only one I can afford to work on my junk.

 

Probably a decade ago? It’s not a Texas car.

 

I have run across stuff like that. Still there after a decade? Not as bad, maybe, as it looks? I am surprised at how well some things hold up.

Ben

 

First thing is... nobody is going to do it for you, like you.
That being said, I use blue quite a bit. The only place I've ever used red was on a used pinion nut.

 

So when I learned this a few years ago I didn't believe it, I always figured lock washers were a necessary thing and I didn't trust loctite but I always wondered how lock washers worked because every time I ever torqued anything down they just became flat like a regular washer. Well it turns out they don't work.
So in the NASA manual titled "fastener design manual RP-1228, 1990, pp. 9-10:" the author claims and I quote
"The lockwasher serves as a spring while the bolt is being
tightened. However, the washer is normally flat by the time
the bolt is fully torqued. At this time it is equivalent to a solid
flat washer, and its locking ability is nonexistent. In summary,
a Iockwasher of this type is useless for locking."
The same thing also goes for the star washer and pretty much every other kind of locking washer made...
Here is the link, it's a PDF file it's kind of boring unless you're really into hardware, I only looked up the lock washer I figure for my 90+ year-old jalopies bubblegum and bailing wire will work just fine.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19900009424
Henry Ford who arguably probably had the best and brightest engineers in automotive History when he made his Model T and his Model A and flattie powered fords felt that tie wire was the best thing to keep bolts backing off and honestly to this day it's probably the best way to keep bolts from backing off but it's also extremely expensive considering every bolt has to be drilled and then the wire has to be hand threaded through the bolt but when you look back at his 1920s or 1930s cars they were always safety wired or cotter pinned because it worked. They were most definitely a guarantee for stuff to not back off and to this day we still use cotter pins on steering components because nobody wants to lose a tie rod end at highway speeds.
When nylock nuts became popular they made safety wire stuff obsolete but nylocks although cheaper then tie wire bolts were still expensive to manufacture and realistically you should never reuse a nylock (even though all of us do or have) and that is where the lock washer comes into common use.
Blue loctite was invented in the early fifties and was sold to the public by the late fifties and it is time tested and proven to work as a good thread locker.
I guess my point is in all of my ramblings here is nylock nuts work, loctite thread locker works, safety wire works but unfortunately the lock washer we all use doesn't appear to have any actual locking capability on a properly torqued bolt it actually works as a washer even though all of us have used them and I honestly still use them because I figure what could it hurt but the reality is it appears to be just a waste of money according to the engineers at NASA.

From my experience on late model cars (late 90s and newer) some form of loctite is used on pretty much every fastener these days, you will see it when you take the bolt out it is absolutely a pain in the butt to get out the first time and it's usually covered in something that appears to be kind of white color if you wire wheel it off the bolt will then go in and out freely I would imagine the manufacturers use it because it works so good you never have fasteners loosen up, loctite is extremely cheap to apply to a bolt and it works like glue so if a bolt has even a remote possibility of vibrating loose they just put loctite on it. I personally have noticed if the bolt heads are shouldered they almost always have loctite and shouldered bolts have became pretty normal in the last few decades.

 

Seriously?
If that is the case that seriously explains a lot on my little bit of experience of rebuilding hydraulic cylinders... Every one of them I think is too tight.

 

Because of my lack of money over 60 years ago, I learned to do my own work. My theory has always been " If God didn't create it, I'm going to try and fix it myself".

 

I cite this report all of the time.

There still exits a virtually unlimited supply of people who insist that they know better than NASA, and every single equipment manufacturer in the face of the Earth.

 

I have a number of his books but that's my favorite, very informative with a little dry humor thrown in.

 

At the risk of being called one of those people, what the NASA engineers failed to factor in to their analysis is that for a lock washer to work properly it should be a harder material than the bolt it is locking ideally and definitely harder than the surface material it is locking on. When they are the same material the lock washer will flatten completely and not have an edge to bite and stop the bolt from rotating. An example would be a hardened steel lock washer on a stamped steel valve cover Star washers are the same. If they can’t get a bite they won’t work.