Second or Third hand parts

[Lucid Moments]

Just a little rant here on the hazards of used parts.

Was working on my race car earlier today. Putting a passenger seat in it so I can do some instructing to offset the cost of my sickness. I bought the car used as a race car (Spec E30) and it came with this seat in it. I took the seat out (Back in February) because it was built for a thinner guy than I am and gave it to a buddy. It originally was put in with side mount brackets and previous owner had used allen head bolts on it that were a PITA to get to and were thrown out as soon as I got done taking it out and buddy had never gotten around to using it. Anyway putting it in today and checked the bolt size and it take 3/8 16 bolts. Off to the hardware store to get bolts. Get back and fight with the mounts for a bit then get three of the four bolts in. Fighting with the fourth bolt and eventually discover that it needs a 8mm 1.25 bolt. WTF? Three SAE bolts and one metric? I get sometimes you have to fix things and have a limited time frame, but seriously what sick person does this?

 

[jimmyin3D]

In my area (Los Angeles) when I was working on cars the cheaper cars (especially Honda Civics, Integras) there would always be mismatched bolts and nuts. Aggravating when a 20minute job takes double that because people don’t give a ****.

And the worst was probably on headunits or center console bolts, sometimes 3 or 4 different bolt threads mix of SAE etc.

 

[ZRX61]

Get back and fight with the mounts for a bit then get three of the four bolts in. Fighting with the fourth bolt and eventually discover that it needs a 8mm 1.25 bolt. WTF? Three SAE bolts and one metric?

I worked on Land Rovers like that. It seemed that someone at the factory had more or less drawn a line from the front left corner to the rear right corner. One side of the line was standard, the other was metric.
Ferinstance:
One fender was held on with 10 or 12mm bolts, the other was 7/16 or 1/2in. Front Diff was standard, rear was metric.


Thought it was weird... then I started working on the 2nd one & it was the exact same.

 

[DGersic]

You got lucky, and didn’t find a wood screw.


Sent from my iPad using The Garage Journal mobile app

 

[matt_i]

I've posted this before but I was changing out a 454 hooked to a THM475 3 speed transmission. 6 bolts between the flexplate and the torque converter...and all 6 were different, a mix of metric, standard and thread lengths, apparently many gobbed on with blue loctite.

Thankfully all of the lugs on the torque converter were serviceable.

I questioned a couple of guys at work putting a (new) M12 bolt into a a new location on a hoisting system that's 100% SAE recently....Functionally it does work but its sort of like using a channellock on hex headed nuts & bolts vs. going to find the proper sized wrench or socket.

 

[Junkdrawer Dog]

I worked in a steel mill that was held together entirely by a random mix of SAE and metric. Lots of reasons. All of them wrong, lol! Everyone walked around with a 12 inch adjustable and Channellocks.

 

[BDT/NWMN]

The trained monkeys who usually do that work were busy with other projects; so bossman asked Rufus to attempt fixing it.

 

[Lassen Forge]

Problem is the bossman was too cheap to keep a stock of standard hardware for their maintenance folk, and instead had a bunch of random coffee cans of assorted **** from the past 40 years of cobbled together ****, and said "Find something in those cans to fit".

Of course, by the time they looked through the 8-10 or so piles out of the folger's cans, picked out likely "volunteers", tried them, found replacements, scooped them back into cans unsorted, and repeated this 10x that week, they could have BOUGHT the right sized bolts that weren't a combination of grade 5, 7, 8.8, 2, and whatever else happened to be there. It gets worse when you have a mix of SAE, USS, 4 different (manufacturer-specific) metric thread standards, different pitches, etc...

Yeah, I've worked in both, and figured for the 3 hours of wasted labor we could have bought the $1.99 parts instead. And what's really fun is going to the boss and telling him he lost 4 hours of production line time, the salaries of everyone waiting to get back to work, because he was too cheap to buy half a dozen 3/8" grade 8 nuts, bolts, and washers.

 

[Wyoming09]

While I don't work on cars I do find this situation on some of our older machinery. Repairs have been made or new updated replacement parts installed and we end up with machines that are some SAE and some Metric. This is why we could never do without both sets in our boxes. Damned frustrating.

 

[MikeF2316]

Happens with "first hand" stuff too. Volvos in the 70s through the mid 80s had York a/c compressors. Their mounting hardware was 3/8". The hardware mounting the bracket to the engine, and other items to the bracket was metric, primarily 10mm. A 10mm nut will thread easily (but loosely) on a 3/8 bolt or stud.

I would imagine other Euro cars that used York compressors had similar issues.

 

[Provincial]

I recently bought a large (105,000 pound) excavator and got for a good price because it had a serious hydraulic oil leak somewhere deep in the internal plumbing of the machine. After spending three days digging down to the leaking area, I found that the leak was coming from a connector joining two halves of a 2-1/2" diameter tube returning the oil to the tank. The connector works like a turbo clamp and a theaded stem squeezes the connector together to compress the seal when a nut is tightened.

I tried to tighten the nut, and it would not turn. I tried removing the nut, and it spun right off! This is a Japanese machine, and the nut was 8mm. I noticed that the nut was a plain nut instead of a nylon-locking version like all the rest on the machine. I suspected that the nut was a replacement, since it was both different and unpainted. Then it dawned on me - 8mm is almost exactly 5/16", so I tried a 5/16" NC nut, which spun on and tightend up, stopping the leak!

It turns out that the couplings were made in the USA by Aeroquip, and the fasteners are all inch NC threads. I replaced the nut with a nylon-locking NC nut, so the parts cost for the fix was less than $0.30. The 8mm nut threaded on until the difference in thread lead caught up between the two systems and the nut jammed.

Assuming that a Japanese machine would have all metric threads lead to a serious mistake.

By the way, I modified things so that the next time I have to access that area, it will take about 20 minutes, and several other maintenance jobs will go correspontingly faster!

 

[Citation]

A while back I had an experience that helped sour me on any dealer installed features in a car. My father passed a '90 Toyota to me. It had dealer installed cruise control. However, that unit had stopped working a while before I got it. Rather than replace I thought I would open it up and see what might be wrong. It was a simple vacuum actuated system so nothing fancy. The mounting was poor but the real shocker was looking at the 4 screws that held a cover on. I would have expected perhaps 4 pan head philips self tappers into the plastic housing or something. Nope, 4 different screws. One was a hex head, one was a countersunk brass screw. I was very clear someone had taken this dealer installed unit apart and reassembled with what ever **** was on hand!

Ironically, that had nothing to do with the failure. The actual failure was a bad solder joint that I quickly reflowed. The system worked great for another 30k miles until I sold the car.

Incidentally, that same poor install work is why I would never get a dealer installed video system in a car. I saw the BS that was the dealer installed system in a friend's SUV. Nope, factory or I'll do it myself.

 

[BDT/NWMN]

Problem is the bossman was too cheap to keep a stock of standard hardware for their maintenance folk, and instead had a bunch of random coffee cans of assorted **** from the past 40 years of cobbled together ****, and said "Find something in those cans to fit".

Of course, by the time they looked through the 8-10 or so piles out of the folger's cans, picked out likely "volunteers", tried them, found replacements, scooped them back into cans unsorted, and repeated this 10x that week, they could have BOUGHT the right sized bolts that weren't a combination of grade 5, 7, 8.8, 2, and whatever else happened to be there. It gets worse when you have a mix of SAE, USS, 4 different (manufacturer-specific) metric thread standards, different pitches, etc...

Yeah, I've worked in both, and figured for the 3 hours of wasted labor we could have bought the $1.99 parts instead. And what's really fun is going to the boss and telling him he lost 4 hours of production line time, the salaries of everyone waiting to get back to work, because he was too cheap to buy half a dozen 3/8" grade 8 nuts, bolts, and washers.

Yep, the unsorted coffee can bolt assortments are an expensive way to be a cheapass boss.. It would drive Me nuts looking through coffee cans or buckets for a particular bolt. I agree; The idea that there might possibly hopefully be something that can be used simply kills too much time. I have never worked in a dealership shop that lacked an ample supply of common bolts and fasteners. As the Parts Manager of an implement dealership; I was responsible for the inventory of common, as well as multiple lines of machine specific bolts and fasteners. I inventory common bolts and fasteners in My now private shop in much the same manner;; only to a MUCH smaller scale. I also keep reusable, salvaged, uncommon, vehicle or machine specific fasteners, which are reasonably cleaned, and somewhat sorted by size, into their own specific used fastener drawers.. Plastic coffee cans work ok for nails. I push the tip of a single nail thru the plastic lid, and leave it sticking out. This way, I can glance at the lid and know what size nails are in the can without removing the lid.

 

[MBfreak]

ZRX 61 "I worked on Land Rovers like that. It seemed that someone at the factory had more or less drawn a line from the front left corner to the rear right corner. One side of the line was standard, the other was metric."
I once rebuilt an old 109" landrover with the 6 cyl engine and electric fuel pump.
The handbrake worked on a drum on the rear prop shaft and drove me round the bend. For some obscure reason all screws were British Byycle Thread. Since they were corroded I had to make a set. Afriend with a tool grinding machine made taps for me. Never seen them anywhere else.
The fuel pump sat under the right hand seat, under a cover. Great access which was good, cause it stalled about once an hour.
Rebuilt it with transistors switching the coil current.

Low compression, one central SU carb on the intake manifold which was cast into the cylinder head. Could idle vibrationless at 400 rpm.
Took 4 of us from Liberia thru jungle, savannah and desert to Algeria.

Ola

 

[jdoe213]

There is a tag line on here that goes something like this....I have been doing things with so little for so long, I don't even know where to begin when I have all I need to do a job right. This is me. I would rather not be this way but sometimes you have to do what you gotta do.

 

[FSrepair&fabrication]

I always carry bins of hardware on my work trucks. This problem is also the reason I charge by the hour. Yea a job might take “x” hours in an ideal situation, but having to figure out the hackjob the last guy did really eats up time.

I used to do side work for a guy that ran a small trucking company. Half of his shop was a pile of old parts and hardware that youd have to dig thru to find what you needed. Drove me crazy that he would insist i dig thru his piles of **** for an hour or more at times instead of buying some decent kits. Finally gave it up, I dont work well with cheapskates.

 

[Lucid Moments]

There is a tag line on here that goes something like this....I have been doing things with so little for so long, I don't even know where to begin when I have all I need to do a job right. This is me. I would rather not be this way but sometimes you have to do what you gotta do.

The way I have heard a similar saying is:

"I have done so much, with so little, for so long that I am now qualified to do absolutely anything with absolutely nothing."