www.jec.org.uk

so. i'm replacing some worn components on one of our fellow members car, this involves new stub axles and lower hub carrier ball joints on the front suspension , although a fairly straight forward process, the size and tightness of some of the nuts and bolts means a lot of knuckle bashing and sweating..........

this leads me onto the problem ,


the lower ball joint seal had failed, letting the weather into the joint, this then resulted in a nasty squeal when turning the steering wheel , on a 1990 car i would expect its on its second or maybe third ball joint from regular service intervals .

with a high quality ( non Jaguar ) lower ball joint ready to be fitted , i tried the original nut as they dont come with the balljoint, hmm , doesn't fit , i hadn't bashed or heated it up , so shouldn't be a problem , tried again , hmm , went to my storage bins, and hour later with all the nuts and bolts spread on the floor i still can't find one that fitted , the original nut did start but soon bound up , so i compared the ball joint thread to the old one, looks the same, a fine thread , must be UNF , but what size ?
the original nut was defiantly a metric nut as it had a blue nylock insert , ( UNF have white inserts ) and must have been forced on by the previous ' ahem' mechanic stripping the threads

i pulled my garage to bits trying to find one...but no luck , i had UNF but not big enough..........got on the phone to the father in law and he told me about Allcap , so i jumped in my company car and went to get some

turned out i needed 9/16 UNF , span on like it grew there , go figure........

at 30p each they weren't expensive , but the right part is worth its weight in gold when needed ,

so a three hour delay to tighten one nut up ,

so what am i trying to say ?

well, the last person to fit the ball joint bodged the job for the sake of 30p , causing me a huge issue

but at least its got the right parts now,

just got to do the other side now

BB

You have to ask yourself, didn't the person notice that this nut was not fitting properly. I have seen this before and on asking I found that the so called mechanic or fitter had used a huge wrench and couldn't feel that some thing was wrong.
PS. JRT just through MOT yesterday with no problems.

PS. JRT just through MOT yesterday with no problems.

that is great news indeed

i still miss her loads.............

BB

Vince

I sympathise, I deal with BA and Whitworth as well as UNF UNC and metric......

...it's a minefield!

TonyS

The metric/unf confusion nearly did for a colleague of mine a few years ago.

Tony may well remember this, www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390
But the root cause was metric bolts inserted into unf captive nuts...