Wrapping up the semester

Under the hood of Jake's Dodge Caravan.

Taking apart Jake's Power steering pump and there's the alternator.

New pump and pulley.

We need the housing off the old pump for the new one.

The housing is dented and won't hold a good seal.

Jake got some sealant from NAPA to make sure it wouldn't leak.

Installing the new pulley onto the pump.

Used the hoist to flip a transmission over and move it to its proper place.

Failure Analysis I and II

Here is also the tightening sequence for those 3 trucks along with any relevant technical service bulletins.

Failure analysis and oil change of "Frankentruck".

Someone finally told Ryan to pull up his pants.

Matt is wiping out the oil drain pan before we use it.

Frankentruck has an oil , air, coolant, coalescing, and fuel filter.

Useful message on the air filter housing.

Old filter...yucky.

Engine Oil Change sheet

Here are some pictures of me tapping a few holes that derrick drilled. We needed to have a 3/8" tap done so we could bolt down the casters into this stand for project Frankenstein. Derrick cleaned up the "welds" done by Eric.

Also sharpened a drill bit last week. You want the cutting edge to be higher than the following edge so it bites into the metal. If it isn't then you have a good chance of one only one drill bit edge cutting. You also want your drill bit to be centered and you can tell very quickly whether or not you've sharpened the bit properly. It literally won't cut if you don't. Some pictures of it are coming. 

Tapping a hole for the bolts for a caster. 

Fresh after a weld.

Installing the casters for Frankentruck's stand.

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Lifting Exercise... and no it's not a workout video.

There were a few main points I took away from this exercise. The first one was that we really needed to be able to estimate the weight of something for a "worst case" scenario. "Hope for the best and plan for the worst". Second was the minor details with the rigging gear itself. With chain you need to make sure the weld is facing outward when engaged by the rigging hook. With rope you need to make sure that it's padded where it rubs against what you're lifting. That way there isn't extra stress on that part of the rope. Obviously with any of them you want both sides to be the same length for stability.

Rope is handy for protecting whatever you're lifting from getting scratched. Chain on the other hand is what you use on an ugly POS that you aren't very concerned about scuffing up the paint job on. 

More pictures are coming.

Handy tool for leveling an engine or manipulating it to where you need it to be.

This is the ugly one that chain would be fine to use on. 

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.

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".