So they sent you the wrong tool but you have to pay shipping again?
So they sent you the wrong tool but you have to pay shipping again?
It's Friday morning now, and I decide "enough is enough", I'm going to drill those easy-outs out, and get crack-a-lackin at those sway bar bolts:
To tap a M8x1.25 bolt, Google tells me that I need to punch a 6.8mm hole.
No prob Bob, I get out my sharpest aircraft grade drill bits, AAAAAAAND....
Nothin.
Any imperfection you see in that there remainder of an easy out, isn't from my bit because that thing couldn't even make dust sized shavings from is beast...
I'm not above getting my butt kicked by an easy-out, but my success rate with these bolts is getting dismal.
Anyhoo, speaking of 5:30 in the morning, look who came to visit!
Time to wrap it up, and I need a quick win before I hit quitting time, so I decided to go back at that heater control valve.
Two 10m bolts, and I gotta remove the cowl to get to them. The cowl is held in place with 5 sheet metal screws, and the hood is still on the truck, so I'll be using a stubby phillips and a 90-deg phillips to get at them:
here we are again:
1/8th turn.... I wonder what time it is...
1/8th turn... I'll probably paint that ignition coil mount when I take it out. it looks like it's starting to rust....
1/8th turn...
1/8th turn... Where did the dogs go? are they in the garage?
1/8th turn...
1/8th turn... (my best Vin Diesel voice) "I live my life an eighth of a turn at a time..."
(chuckling ensues until the fastener an be twisted by hand
and repeat for four screws.
Which brings me to screw #5... The one directly in the middle of the panel... it's free spinning....
At first I try to put some tension on it by prying up with a screwdriver while turning the stubby screw driver like in the picture below:
but nothing happened there either.
At this time, I'm a bit tired of constantly getting my butt kicked by swaybar bolts that I didnt break, head bolts and easy outs that I did break, 12mm thermostat bolts that insisted on bringing threads with them, 10mm bolts that free spin on the firewall... I decide that a free-spinning sheetmetal screw is where I draw the line...
I get my two favorite pry-drivers and:
CRUNCH.
Screw you screw. I win.
(But I'm also out of time, so the panel is still installed)
Fun stuff
I have never had any luck drilling EZ outs. I kind of avoid them for exactly that reason....
Time to learn to weld and weld a nut onto those broken off bits. Hopefully the welding heat will help free the rust a bit too.
paddygarcia said:So they sent you the wrong tool but you have to pay shipping again?
Yup, and I'll gladly accept.
They could have just as easily said "no prob, send it back and we'll..."
And then I'd either be stuck with the wrong tool, or I'd be out shipping three times.
java230 said:I have never had any luck drilling EZ outs. I kind of avoid them for exactly that reason....
Time to learn to weld and weld a nut onto those broken off bits. Hopefully the welding heat will help free the rust a bit too.
You're giving me dangerous ideas... I'm having thoughts where i drill the whole shebang out, weld nuts to plate steel, and weld those plates (nut side in) onto my frame...
Do those two new rockers look like they have the same ratio as the old one?
Woody (Forum Supportum) said:Do those two new rockers look like they have the same ratio as the old one?
So then I continued reading after posting this.
Nevermind.
Hungary Bill (Forum Supporter) said:java230 said:I have never had any luck drilling EZ outs. I kind of avoid them for exactly that reason....
Time to learn to weld and weld a nut onto those broken off bits. Hopefully the welding heat will help free the rust a bit too.
You're giving me dangerous ideas... I'm having thoughts where i drill the whole shebang out, weld nuts to plate steel, and weld those plates (nut side in) onto my frame...
I support this idea!
Drilling is still going to be a bitch. Small hole saw to avoid the ez out part?
Hungary Bill (Forum Supporter) said:Also, here's the damage (er... I mean "order") sheet for today:
It seems like a lot when you look at the shipping and customs, but there's no getting around it. I priced a head bolt set locally for $70, the the rest wasn't much cheaper.
Plus there's that RockAuto magnet
Yo, obligatory nod to RockAuto!
Half-way around the world in 3 working days!!!
AND it came with an extra magnet! 
java230 said:Hungary Bill (Forum Supporter) said:java230 said:I have never had any luck drilling EZ outs. I kind of avoid them for exactly that reason....
Time to learn to weld and weld a nut onto those broken off bits. Hopefully the welding heat will help free the rust a bit too.
You're giving me dangerous ideas... I'm having thoughts where i drill the whole shebang out, weld nuts to plate steel, and weld those plates (nut side in) onto my frame...
I support this idea!
Drilling is still going to be a bitch. Small hole saw to avoid the ez out part?
I might be making things more difficult for myself than needs be, but since hole-saws require me to buy things (I don't own any), I was thinking about grabbing my smallest bit and drilling around one of the two below circles:
The inner (red arrow) is between the bolt and threaded hole but would probably be too small by itself to do what we need to do there with the new nuts.
Drilling around the green circle I think is my preferred choice as that would get us closer to a hole diameter that would work.
From there I'd just keep increasing the bit diameters until the holes joined and ta-da! I could file smooth, and run with it.
(That's the idea at least. By now we know how these things work out for me)
Good times.
Also: My new IFS Toyota spindle nut adapter is making itself right at home with my solid axle Toyota spindle nut adapter I got from the New Years Game
Sunday morning and I go outside and it immediately starts storming. No need to count after you see the flash of lightning, the thunder hits immediately overhead... No way am I crawling under the truck in this sort of stuff. How in the world did it come on so quickly??? And how am I going to get my coffee??? (I only came out to open the door and turn on the lights. It wasn't storming when I did THAT)
I've got one coupon left from the "Bill's learning to weld" attempt, and they're near perfect for a mockup of the swaybar mounts:
At 100X40x5mm (LxWxT) they're about the right length, but I feel like the stock is a little too narrow for what I want to do. The rain clears up later in the morning so I'm able to poke my head under with a scale, and sure enough the frame is a little over 50mm wide (unknown thickness):
I'm thinking 50mm wide material is going to be more what I'm after, so today (Monday) I swing by the metal shop after I drop the kids off for school and pick up 3-meters worth that's cut into one-meter lengths (I pick up some M8x1.25 nuts too).
But that's all in the future. Going back to stormy Sunday morning, I'm kicking around and looking for something I can do from the safety of my garage and I decide that it's time to drill out the headers to hold those two extra bolts I want to install. I'm going to use a spare exhaust gasket I have as a template to locate the new holes, but before I can do that I've gotta remove that metal piece that serves as a plug wire protector (the DT Try-Y header flange wont allow it to be installed with gaskets that have this feature). It wasn't exactly difficult, but there wasnt anythign that was exactly keeping those rivets from free-spinning either.
With the gasket clamped up, I thought I was able to align everything good enough so I center punched and started drilling.
But as I was drilling and wiping away oil, I was also wiping away the soot of the flange as well. Eventually the easy stuff came off, and only the stains remained.
Looking at the stains versus my hole location, it looked to me like I was off by about half a diameter 
No big deal, but I'm glad I caught it this early (so much for aligning hole via the gasket, though!)
I just made snow-men out of them and then punched it out to a size that would work:
Cool story, but did it work?
Well, I'm glad you asked! The rain let up, and the clouds were gone, so I stepped out and gave it a test:
Ta-da!
(It's good to have that done, I was putting it off for a while)
Good times
Anyhoo, still Sunday morning and the rain left as quick as it came so I'm coffee'd up and still going at things. I've only got about 30-minutes before people start waking up, so I figured I'd play it safe and go after that heater control valve. Off the cowl goes, and in I went:
There's that nut that's holding it on, but I couldnt help but notice there was an anchor nut attached to the firewall...
I had high hopes of installing the new control valve with hardware that would thread into those anchor nuts, but nothing in my arsenal (er... coffee can) seemed to work.
Weird...
Anyhoo, on with the "out with the old, in with the new"
Easy money. And better yet, my heater control knob now moves all the way to "full hot"!
Good times.
I think I missed something...you're making brackets for your swaybar mount. Does that mean you're giving up on the factory mounting points and either welding some new brackets on or just moving the anchor points far enough one direction to miss the factory points? Either solution would work fine.
Congrats on the heater control valve. You've needed a win. Also, after paying all that for customs and shipping, isn't it so nice when something actually gets there quickly? It's like you almost got what you paid for. Almost.
I'd think about cutting the header flange between your two new bolts.
Was the old heater valve set up for rear heat?
In reply to solfly :
Interesting idea about the flange. What would the benefits be?
I think the old heater valve had a port welded on for a LPG system the truck once had. The truck DOES have rear heat, but I'm not sure if that's controlled by the heater valve or not. I don't see any other attaching provisions in the area if that's something that should be there. I'll have to see if it works when I get everything back together. I dont think anyone's tried to use the rear heat yet.
Mezzanine said:I think I missed something...you're making brackets for your swaybar mount. Does that mean you're giving up on the factory mounting points and either welding some new brackets on or just moving the anchor points far enough one direction to miss the factory points? Either solution would work fine.
Congrats on the heater control valve. You've needed a win. Also, after paying all that for customs and shipping, isn't it so nice when something actually gets there quickly? It's like you almost got what you paid for. Almost.
Man, I tell ya. It really sucks when you need to depend on that shipping but you're troubleshooting something that needs fixed yesterday. There's that pressure to be 100% sure, because if you're wrong, it's another 2-weeks and you're out of pocket 2x the price of the part again.
The current plan is to drill out the current points, leaving two large holes in the frame where those used to be (And this is where it gets optimistic quick). I'm going to weld 2 nuts to flat bar stock, and weld that bar stock to the frame to replace the mounting points I just drilled out.
I think pictures might explain it better though:
In the famous words of Jeremy Clarkson, "how hard could it be?"
Bill, I did the same thing to install a 2" receiver on my XJ Cherokee many years ago. I made the plates quite a bit longer to help fish the nuts to their proper spot.
Good solution, Bill. That'll work great.
Pro tip: don't spare the weld on the nuts on the back side of the plate...you don't want those to break when future Bill is trying to remove the swaybar. Run a tap through them after they've cooled fully just to make sure they haven't warped too much. A little warping is fine...just consider those locknuts. 
The plates you've got will suit fine, but for next time I'd advise making them larger and scalloped at the ends so you're distributing the heat and stress of the plate across more surface area of the frame. See bicycle lugs for example; they don't do those scalloped edges just to be pretty, but to distribute the load further.
In reply to Mezzanine and Preach:
So the panels pictured are just my practice pieces. The stock i have for this is 10mm wider and hasn't been cut to length yet so larger is possible.
Showing my ignorance here, but by "scalloped" do you mean like this?
If so, just give me a rough angle and I can be all over it.
next up, i may be worried about nothing here, but when i remove the millscale from the backside of this plate and weld it to the frame (which will have all the paint removed), I'll essentially have bare metal flat up against bare metal... is this going to be a corrosion issue worth worrying about?
And if so, do any of the below help offer a solution?
Trans due in next Wednesdaaaaaaaaay!!!!!
(Scoffs) 89lbs, hah! We could have totally got that stuffed within the oversized baggage limits.
Hungary Bill (Forum Supporter) said:next up, i may be worried about nothing here, but when i remove the millscale from the backside of this plate and weld it to the frame (which will have all the paint removed), I'll essentially have bare metal flat up against bare metal... is this going to be a corrosion issue worth worrying about?
get some weld through primer
In reply to solfly :
That may be a tall order for the area but I'll check 
FWIW: The cheapest I found on e-bay was $50 a can, and I'm sorry but that's not happening
Where to begin... It's Thursday, and believe it or not I've been trying to get out to the garage all week but our house and garden have been so neglected that when I visited yesterday I found the weeds were taller than I was!!!
I'm still not done doing what I need to do with the weed eater, but today was a rainy day so the eldest and I took advantage of it. First by watching T3 (his request, I'm old enough that grumpy me has decided T2 was the last Terminator movie), and then by me sneaking of to the garage for an hour (Hungarling was invited, but declined). Honestly, I should have been taking a nap (and am paying for it now) as I was up 'till 2am last night, and then woke up at 6am to rouse the kids for school... But hey, tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and clear and that means more yard work obligations so it's now or never:
I started by making some 120mm coupons out of that 50mm bar stock I had, and comparing them to the frame of the truck:
I'm thinking the gap in that last picture is caused by what's still protruding from the holes I plan on drilling out (it's raining remember, so I wasn't about to lay on my back with a drill today).
I got everything measured out and started making holes in things. (obligatory "you know the drill" pun)
That's where my "get ready for work alarm" went off. All of the above was done on the smaller 100cmx40cm stock I was previously using for learning to weld coupons. The real stuff will be bigger.
Good times.
You didnt really think I'd get everything set up and then would just be able to walk away, did you???
Nah. The machine was out, and I had to use it. Now much to the chagrin of my welding teacher I didn't have my foot pedal hooked up for this one, but sleep deprived me was thinking "I'm not going to be able to operate a foot pedal while laying on my back under the truck, and welding over my face. So I'm not going to practice with it here..." (more on that in a second).
SO, using my hand operated clicker, I set to task:
I thought I was doing pretty darn good at making things up as I went, but BOY does that nut melt fast!!!! First thing I learned was to start low (on the plate) and work up. I seem to have forgotten that at that red circled area... A few things going on there.
1) afore mentioned lack of torch control. I went high and knew it immediately as that notch at the top of the nut installed itself right away.
2) looks like a bit of contamination there? I used a paper towel soaked in acetone to clean things and noticed it left fibers in the rough metal. I might need to find a different cleaning material (cloth rag, maybe?)
3) A complete lack of metallurgical sympathy. By this point, I've already had 4 or 5 clicks and that nut was GLOWING. This is quasi intentional. I knew I was overheating things, but I'm still new at this and really wanted to see what I could get away with. "Not much" it turns out. This might be a "tack 3, and move on to somthing else". A shame really because the post flow on my machine is set and uses a LOT of gas. It kills me every time I have to wait for it to run out.
Anyhoo, Mr. Mezzanine mentioned running a tap through the threads afterwards and I can definitely see why. Getting this thing as hot as I did, for as long as I did, really made the threads.... mushy?
Maybe I'll tack 2 and move on... try to keep the heat to a minimum. I did get the full "locknut" effect though. Fun stuff.
Anyhoo, back to that clicker. It wasn't until the drive to work that my brain caught up to what I was doing. Brain: "Hoser. You're going to be lying on your back when you install the plates.in the truck.. NOT when you weld the nuts to the dang plates!!!"
Thanks brain. Next time I'll be using the pedal. All good practice though.
Good times 
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