Matt and the gang at Eastwood are always having fun building cool stuff and showing us how it’s done. In this video he’s making the final preparations for bolting the body of his channeled 1930 Ford to the chassis, and has decided that the frame’s wall thickness is just not enough for him to feel comfortable threading it directly. So instead he whips up some threaded inserts and welds them in place for a strong and relatively simple fix if you have the right tools.
No to make the inserts Matt chucks some nuts up in the lathe and machines them down to his required diameter. If you are like us, and don’t have a lathe, you can also buy threaded weldable inserts of all kinds from lots of different suppliers. Or, with the right belt or disc sander and some patients you can make your own DIY Threaded Inserts as well. Sure you might kill a few nuts that don’t turn out quite well enough, but their cheap so we think it’s worth it.
Watch the video, get creative, and have some fun.
Cool and all, if you have a lathe ..
or just us a nut sert and grind off the top and then weld it in.. no lathe required..
Welding grade 8 to Mild steel is not a good idea. The grade 8 material will become brittle from the heat. Spend the money and buy good inserts that can be welded to the frame. Remember that these fasteners are holding the body on your car or worse your braking system to the frame.
You could do that in your mill…chuck a bolt or stud in to where a cutter would go, thread on a nut or two and have a tool bit fastened in a vise or however to run it down against and use the table cranks. Drill presses can also be used that way, with power tools such as a 4\” grinder etc. doing the cutting being as it\’s a much less rigid quill. Rough but works.
Using that grade-8 nut in the vid is silly for a body mount and as noted above, not going to get the best weld in an application where the welding is everything.
Really a better way for exactly what\’s being done here is to not cut the nut down at all, grind or etch the zinc plating off if it has it and drill a hole almost big enough to accommodate the hex and hammer it in, then fill the open space with welding and have opportunity for a lot more penetration and less chance of getting into the fastener threads. Needing to run a tap in to clean things out is probable in any event.
Nutserts are of-course made for light use only and don\’t have enough material to weld on.
Hey my Captcha said \”Ausfahrt\”! That\’s just wrong…
Use Grace 5 bolts instead. Less chance of becoming brittle after welding.
Thread nuts on all thread, chuck in drill and spin against bench grinder.