Monday, February 17, 2014

VI Clamping force

The main thing I took away from this exercise was how clamping force transfers dry vs lubed. When we stretched the bolts dry they would usually end up seizing. We would end up using more torque but it wouldn't transfer to the bolt. All that would happen was the nut would fail and strip before the bolt yielded.

When we did the same exercise with the bolts lubed the bolts would require less torque before failing. I believe this is because the international compound (lube) causes the clamping force to transfer to the bolt a lot more than if it were dry. I think this is why manufacturer's want lube to be used on their engine fasteners because they can calculate the clamping force that will be transferred. So basically you should always use the lube the manufacturer calls for and be sure it's the correct one.

On another note when we did the lubed exercise we used a higher grade nut for each bolt so that we could make the bolt fail instead of the nut failing first. You can always use a better nut.

On a side note I started taking apart a Volvo marine hydraulic transmission...but there's never anything to do after class.






The Jeff bolt-clamp-o-meter X1000. It's the latest from BTC engineering. 


Volvo HS1a 

Input shaft and you can see the bearing right behind it.

Just started by getting the bearing housing off.

Sigh...Volvo.

Just got the bearing housing off for starters and you can see the tapered bearing here. Notice the fastener keeping it in place...it looks awfully familiar.
This is the diagram for the transmission...yikes.

A lot of the fasteners on here were pretty seized and hard to get off.
Valve housing took a dead-blow hammer to get off the bearing rollers. It had a fever and the only prescription was cowbell.



















Monday, February 10, 2014

Phase V: Torque to failure

One thing that seemed to occur again and again was that the nut would fail before the bolt would. If you used the same grade nut as the bolt you'd end up with just a stripped nut. On the other hand if you used a higher grade nut say a grade 8 then you'd be able to torque the bolt to failure. It also seems that it causes the bolt to fail at a lower torque than if you used a lower quality nut. I believe this is because the grade 8 nut is harder than the bolt so it "bites" into the softer steel on the bolt. This seems to conclude that you are able to "get more" out of a fastener with a higher grade nut.

Man's best friend.


Some nuts just don't want to come off.

Required tools for breaking bolts and bustin some nuts.

Our class strongly believes in cleaning up after ourselves...



Torquing these bolts to failure dry ended up stripping the nuts except the grade 8 bolt/nut.


Even the grade 5 nut just ended up stripping before the bolt broke.

Stripped nut that's as smooth as butter.

Grade 8 nut with a no dash bolt caused the bolt to break at 60ftlbs.

Using a nut splitter since someone graciously left me 3 stripped nuts.
I've lovingly nicknamed it the "Ex-wife".



Phase IV: Fastener Identification

I had originally typed these on to an excel spreadsheet for easier reading but I lost those files. Excuse the hieroglyphics.





Stock twist off and Phase I, II, and III