• Welcome to ClassicBroncos! - You are currently viewing the forums as a GUEST. To take advantage of all the site features, please take a moment to register. It's fast, simple and absolutely free. So please join our community today!
    If you have problems registering or can't log into your account, please contact Admin.

My stock height suspension steering geometry picture

OP
OP
skrit

skrit

Contributor
A Horse with No Name
Joined
Apr 24, 2006
Messages
395
Loc.
Durham
I'll update on the inner wheel well once I get this stupid upper track bar bolt out from my post today
Paul, I forgot that inner wheel well got buggered up when I took the body off. I can assure you it was not bent before. Also appears to not have been cut.
20241110_155518.jpg
 

ntsqd

heratic car camper
Joined
Jan 30, 2005
Messages
3,631
Loc.
Upper SoKA
Just to drive it home I'll say it again, if you put a bolt in tighten it to spec. Do this with every bolt or nut, even if you know that it has to come out later. If you put in a bolt and then it's lunch time or a honey-do deadline is near, either take the bolt back out or tighten it before you go off to do whatever.

Something that GM learned the hard way on the Square Body 4x trucks is that short bolts like those mounting the steering box don't elastically stretch very much before they fail. Anyone who has ever pulled one of those steering boxes has probably wondered why the bolts were so long and then they had spacers in there, and likely figured some idiot lost the original bolts.
Within reason you probably can't buy a bolt that is strong enough if you start failing those short bolts. What you can do, and is what GM did, is use a longer bolt with a spacer to make up the difference in the length. Longer bolts elastically stretch further before failing.
 

DirtDonk

Contributor
Bronco Guru
Joined
Nov 3, 2003
Messages
48,835
Interesting. And like so many things those clever engineering types do, makes sense too.
They should have used that same logic on the shock mounts though!
Those trucks, from '73 right up into at least the mid-80's at least, were constantly tearing the shock mounts right off the frame. Front and back.
We kept a huge supply of frame reinforcement kits for the steering box area, and an equally huge supply of the bolt-on shock mounts. Along with whatever reinforcing plates were needed when the tear-out became too large.

Paul
 
OP
OP
skrit

skrit

Contributor
A Horse with No Name
Joined
Apr 24, 2006
Messages
395
Loc.
Durham
Just to drive it home I'll say it again, if you put a bolt in tighten it to spec. Do this with every bolt or nut, even if you know that it has to come out later. If you put in a bolt and then it's lunch time or a honey-do deadline is near, either take the bolt back out or tighten it before you go off to do whatever.

Something that GM learned the hard way on the Square Body 4x trucks is that short bolts like those mounting the steering box don't elastically stretch very much before they fail. Anyone who has ever pulled one of those steering boxes has probably wondered why the bolts were so long and then they had spacers in there, and likely figured some idiot lost the original bolts.
Within reason you probably can't buy a bolt that is strong enough if you start failing those short bolts. What you can do, and is what GM did, is use a longer bolt with a spacer to make up the difference in the length. Longer bolts elastically stretch further before failing.
Yes sir - I just found some bolts that I never torqued! I will be going through each and every one before the body is on.
 

ntsqd

heratic car camper
Joined
Jan 30, 2005
Messages
3,631
Loc.
Upper SoKA
[HIJACK]
Yes sir - I just found some bolts that I never torqued! I will be going through each and every one before the body is on.
It's the trendy thing to do these days, but marking the torqued fasteners with a paint pen really is a useful thing to do. With a rigorous torquing method it is much easier to keep track of what you've torqued and what you have not.
Carroll Smith's two books "Engineer to Win" and "Nuts, Bolts, Fasteners & Plumbing (AKA "Screw to Win")" are both really good reference books to have around. Their chapters overlap a bit, but each is worth it. Smith has a way of putting complex ideas into simple words and making them understandable. His decades of work as a Race Engineer gave him good insight into how things fail and what to do about them before they fail so that they don't fail. Some of it any A&P mechanic will say "we've known that for decades" (but anyone else would only know it from going to A&P school) and some of it is ground vehicles specific.
Good advice, far too late for me. But at least the ones I put in loosely are very loose and obvious.
Never too late to start. :)

Interesting. And like so many things those clever engineering types do, makes sense too.
They should have used that same logic on the shock mounts though!
Those trucks, from '73 right up into at least the mid-80's at least, were constantly tearing the shock mounts right off the frame. Front and back.
We kept a huge supply of frame reinforcement kits for the steering box area, and an equally huge supply of the bolt-on shock mounts. Along with whatever reinforcing plates were needed when the tear-out became too large.

Paul
The longer bolt didn't stop their problems, it just fixed the bolts snapping. The later trucks had a sort-of brace/bracket, but the kit that really helped is the brace kit from Autofab. Now everyone makes a clone of that kit.
[/HIJACK]
 
Top