Paul Narramore
pre-moderated
- Messages
- 840
- Location
- Aylesford, Kent
They say a poor workman always blames his tools and in some cases that's true......but not always. I tend to pay a bit extra for quality tools as I hate it when they let me down. Now onto yesterday's 'let down'.
Door pockets on an R4. Very handy, what would we do without them? They have a number of widgets along the bottom edge, all of which have done a walkabout about since my car was built thirty years ago, so just two self tappers hold the door pockets in place, one at either end. Some of the time. Once in a while, they'll loosen and/or drop out, causing the door pocket to drop down and making closing the door a tad difficult. Yesterday I decided to cure this by removing and chucking away the damned self tappers. Can you tell I hate self tappers?
I dug out my cheap Rivnut tool - can you see where this is leading to? - and chose a couple of M4 alloy rivnuts. These required the existing holes to be enlarged to 6mm. No problem there. The first rivnut went in OK, but the second one caused the M4 mandrel to snap like a carrot. No gorilla pressure, just a normal squeeze of the £22.99 tool and this one snapped. I managed to unwind the broken off stud but the second one could not be fitted without the correct mandrel.
I've now bought, after reading up about the various tools available and watching Utube videos of them being demonstrated, a pair of decent quality UK-made M4 and M6 tools (ebay - kab engineers) and look forward to trying them out when they arrive.
I also remember trying some stainless steel rivnuts a while back and simply didn't have the hand strength to expand them whilst these 'new' tools rely on spanners.
Door pockets on an R4. Very handy, what would we do without them? They have a number of widgets along the bottom edge, all of which have done a walkabout about since my car was built thirty years ago, so just two self tappers hold the door pockets in place, one at either end. Some of the time. Once in a while, they'll loosen and/or drop out, causing the door pocket to drop down and making closing the door a tad difficult. Yesterday I decided to cure this by removing and chucking away the damned self tappers. Can you tell I hate self tappers?
I dug out my cheap Rivnut tool - can you see where this is leading to? - and chose a couple of M4 alloy rivnuts. These required the existing holes to be enlarged to 6mm. No problem there. The first rivnut went in OK, but the second one caused the M4 mandrel to snap like a carrot. No gorilla pressure, just a normal squeeze of the £22.99 tool and this one snapped. I managed to unwind the broken off stud but the second one could not be fitted without the correct mandrel.
I've now bought, after reading up about the various tools available and watching Utube videos of them being demonstrated, a pair of decent quality UK-made M4 and M6 tools (ebay - kab engineers) and look forward to trying them out when they arrive.
I also remember trying some stainless steel rivnuts a while back and simply didn't have the hand strength to expand them whilst these 'new' tools rely on spanners.