So, you may (or may not) recall that my passenger-side motor mount was broken, and that I had found a replacement for it when I was up in Pennsylvania doing things with the axle housings.
Unfortunately, the best motor mount I was able to find (original, not float-a-motor) had a crack in it, right where mine were broken off. Picking this scab a bit told me this is apparantly a design flaw in the Model A's original mounts.
But fotunately, it was just warm enough for me to do some work on that mount today. First things first, I set it up in my vice and used my hand-grinder to grind out the crack:
I did my best to make sure there were no hard-angles in that grind, and then I took the mount around to my garage and performed a "fill weld."
I ground down the weld and found a couple of small voids, so I did another pass with the stick welder and ground it down again. Looked pretty decent, and I hope it's structurally sound, since I'm only an ameteur when it comes to arc welding... After that, I gave it all a coat of primer and called it a day, as it was getting late.
Merry Christmas!
So, you might recall that last month, my rear spring U-bolts stripped when I was trying to install them... I ordered some new U-bolts, and they came in a few days ago. These bolts are extra long so they can accomodate differently-sized spring stacks. This means you have to cut them to length and drill holes for the cotter pins. They also do not have the centering pin that the original bolts have...
I cut down the first U-bolt, and was getting ready to drill it when my brother-in law said something along the lines of:
Far be it from me to tell a guy how to do what he's tryin' to get done and whatnot, but if it were me doing a job like this, I'd go put it all together first and make sure it all fit together right before I got too deep into it...
Sometimes I recognize good advice when it's handed to me, and so we hiked back around to the garage to do a pre-installation. I put one of the bolts on and started tightening down the brackets. I wasn't putting much force on the things at all, and damned if the thing didn't strip!
My thinking is that when I was trying to tighten down the original, I still had not gotten the cotter pins to be able to go in. I had measured the torque on those, and I was above 75 ft-lbs, and these stripped at closer to about 50 ft-lbs. Thus, I think they were defective.
I called up the reseller & explained what happened. They were gracious and immediately shipped me a new bolt. I asked if there was a torque spec on them, as the manual just says "tighten until you can install the cotter pin."
They did some research and agreed that there was no torque spec, and that the 75 ft-lb number I was using should probably be all right. Some of the mechanical engineers I work with agreed that it should probably be a lot higher for a bolt of that size...
Anyway, that was the end of all work for today, so... See you next time!
Last modified on 03/24/14
