Brammo Empulse Discussion > Brammo Empulse Mods

Screw It

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Shinysideup:
Replaced OEM plated pan-head torx screws with stainless steel socket head cap screws, mostly on the battery cases, and rear fender. Will slowly go after almost all of them.

Why?
The mixture of screw types bothers me. (I know... I know..)
I like stainless: its looks, its durability.
I've always liked the looks of Allen head screws.
It's more studly looking?
It's the UUF: Ultimate Useless Farkle
I get to feel what it must be like to work on the Ashland assembly line.
It indulges my OCD. Definitely exercises my OCD. Definitely my OCD.
OK, OK: there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to spend any time at all doing this.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/10852133@N02/8430443224/#in/set-72157632567075439

Tip to the thousands wanting to follow my path into madness:
Open up a large paperclip.
Poke it in the small hole in the battery mounting bracket for the screws ABOVE the hole.
Do this before removing old screw and while starting new screw.
Also, poke the paper clip up the mounting groove in the black battery case for those screws that are BELOW their small hole.
Do this before removing old screw and while starting new screw.

Why, you might well ask? Because some of the small bits into which the screws thread will dislodge and slide down their groove in the battery case (Newton's forces at work) and be damned near irretrievable from the dark nether regions of your Empulse. DAMHIK.

And oh yes, I torqued every last screw to 41 inch lbs, just like the manual specified.

Gavin:
You are my new hero....and you are clearly insane :)

Gavin

do you have a before and after?

protomech:
Allen head screws are super sexy. I love this.

The fasteners for the bodywork on the Zero are really poorly done IMO. Half of them are plastic fasteners which start to fail after a few cycles. Half of them are black phillips-head screws which are starting to rust (!)..

The raised screw head works well on the battery mounts, not sure how it'd do on the bodywork for the Zero. Might get a small number and try them.

BrammoBrian:
Would you be interested in a Titanium bolt kit?  We've developed a kit for the TTX.  It would be slightly less useless as you'd be saving weight versus the standard hardware. If so, tell Don at Scuderia...



The battery bracket to frame bolts are titanium as is the shock bolt.  They are tapered head sockets from Pro-Bolt.  We also upgrade the brake caliper bolts, which saves the most weight.

BTW... we try to avoid using stainless as it galls in aluminum... so you may want to add some anti-galling/anti-seize to those bolts.

Brammofan:
It galled me that I had no idea what you meant by "gall."  So I googled a bit.


--- Quote ---Why does stainless steel gall?
I recently ran into a situation where some 1/2" 316SS bolts were frozen in a 316SS liquid head on an HPLC system. The bolts would come about half way out just fine and then lock up for some reason. The system is brand new. I feel pretty sure that the threads were cut accurately. There was no lubrication present. A colleague told me that this happens quite often with SS. We could not get all the bolts out and scrapped the part. What in the world causes this?

(A) Think of a snowball going downhill. It picks up more snow as it rolls along and
gets bigger.

If you were to cut apart that scrapped assembly you'd see tiny little stainless steel
snowballs. They'll be jamming the threads because they grew as the fastener
began to turn. They grew in size until all the thread clearance was gone.

Stainless is especially prone to this as it does not really form any surface oxide
so the very clean surfaces rubbing in contact will weld to each other when
there's relative motion. Also note that when you reverse direction on the
bolt, the snowball does NOT get smaller. It keeps on getting bigger.

This is a problem that's well-understood by high vacuum folks. The classic is
the new guy who assembles a system with conflat flanges and goes not put
molycoat on the bolts. Then he bakes the system at 150C which *really* cleans
the fasteners but good.

Never get any of those flanges apart ever again wihtout sawing the bolts off.
--- End quote ---

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