On Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:30:58 -0800, Winston
wrote:

Ed Huntress wrote:
On Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:43:39 -0500, jeff_wisnia
wrote:

(...)

Just a thought....If there's enough room there and you could borrow a
large enough nut splitter the job would almost do itself:

http://www.northerntool.com/shop/too...ct_34573_34573

I've had a couple of sizes of nut splitters in my "hell box" for 30+
years and every so often one comes in handy.

I agree that would have come in handy. It would had to have been
a very large tool for a 3/4" dia. thread, as Ed says.

Yeah, I use one, too. It was a regular maintenance tool on my '78 Ford
Fiesta, which had special anti-nut-loosening features that involved
rusting the nuts in place if you looked at them cross-eyed. It was
like ultraviolet-cure adhesive, but you could do it with your naked
eyes; faster if you have X-ray vision.

Anyway, I had to sharpen mine from time to time (even to finishing
with a hard Arkansas stone) because I used it to crack some pretty
hard nuts with it. In Winnie's case, I wondered about finding one
large enough and also about how hard that nut may be.

It sounds like it's junk, so maybe a nut splitter is the trick.

I looked it over and decided that I could slice through
the middle of the nut flats with some Dremel discs.
(It took 5 discs, one shattered).

After slicing through two opposing flats and attacking the
gaps with a chisel, I managed to split the nut into two
semicircles and free the hitch ball without damaging the
bumper.

The autopsy shows the nut thread and the stud thread
look surprisingly intact. The plating on the stud
is down into the copper for the length of the nut
on both walls of the thread and the crown of the thread
is much shinier and flattened in relation to the crown
of the non-stressed part of the stud.

The minor diameter of the nut is flattened for about
100 degrees and much sharper for ~260 degrees

This is supposed to be a 3/4-16 thread.

So the major thread of the stud should be no less
than 0.75" dia. It measures 0.744". The nut is no
longer with us as such but it appears that the minor
diameter of the nut widened and began slipping over
successive crowns of the major diameter of the stud.

I measured the thread on the replacement ball and
found the major diameter of the stud to be 0.743"
instead of 0.75". The minor diameter of the nut
should measure no more than 0.6823". The new nut
measures 0.689" I.D.! So our fasteners appear to
be sloppy to the tune of about 0.007" per side!

The tightening specification is 160 ft. lbs.
I don't know how much force I was applying to the nut
but I would be very much surprised to learn it was
much over ~40 ft. lbs when the fasteners failed,
given the short lever arm of the ratchet and the
remaining muscle tone of a weak old man.

Given that the thread on the replacement ball appears
to be even sloppier than the thread of the ball from
O'Reilly Auto, I will assume that it will fail at
somewhat lower torque than did the O'Reilly part.

I conclude that Ed is right.

These parts are junk.

Thanks for your patience and advice.



--Winston



Made in China crap, packaged inMexican Free Trade Zone and labelled as
made in USA???