I was thinking of using lynch pins instead of bolts to hook the rod eyes to the clevises on my mounts. Not exactly sure yet what / how, but the general question is, how important is the torque of the bolt? It seems to me as long as you have the right diameter, it shouldn't matter all that much.
Maybe it would make more sense if I rephrase. The bolt pinches the clevis shut onto the rod eye. An unthreaded pin, with some sort of clip to hold this pin, instead of a bolt with a nut, would not pinch this together at all. There would be some slop back & forth. Proper diameter, of course, so there is no slop in the rod eye hole nor the clevis hole, just back & forth.
How bad would this be? I don't see the clip taking any load, or am I way off base on that?
You wouldn't like it. The slop I think would drive you crazy just for starters. But, more to the point, the toe in and the lean out on my bike changes from just having the bolts in place to having the nuts socked down tight. If you use those lynch pins I think you would notice the changes to toe in and lean out as you go down the road. Much better to have everything torqued down tight. Not to mention what might happen if the retainer on one of the pins was to fail.
Have owned 5 rigs but Rig #2 is my current one!
So it does make that much of a difference. Thanks a lot! Probably won't do it, then. It's not like it's a big deal to unbolt.
My idea was more along the lines of when I had a catastrophe and was taking the sidecar off to leave it on the side of the road, and come back later with the car & trailer. Not so much for conversion. I can still bring the big wrenches along. 🙂
You might wanna pack a pin or two just in case you need a roadside spare. Also, the tapered nose of the pin makes for a good alignment pin during assembly. Don’t want to risk your bolt threads if you have to “persuade” your hiem into the clevis!
Thanks!
I agree that bolts are by far the better way to go for all the reasons stated previously. Mounts should be tight and stay tight and share the loads as much as possible. Clamping forces are your friend in the big picture. Many use heim ends on the lower mounts and some of us do not as they do not provide any resistance on all planes.
Thanks, Claude. What would you use instead, a ball joint sort of mount? I'm all for listening to ideas from experts, especially if they make it easier to not crash. 🙂
Most use an eyenut to and eyenut connection. We do this. Some use an eyenut to a clevis connection and we do this too if someone is dead set on it. It can be more of a pain to work with but it satisfys the arm chair engineers LOL. Some argue the ability to set toe in properly with these setup but in real life is is totally, perfectly fine and time proven.We are by far not alone in this method , not even close..
I think I'm thick. I'm missing something, maybe I just don't understand the terminology. Eye nut like this?
No not at all. If this site was a little more picture posting friendly it would be nice. UGH
To help out Claude a bit, his clevis and eye rod ends can be viewed on his website. The pic is not a real close-up but if you look hard you can see them. I've never seen those type ends on McMaster-Carr or anywhere else.
Also, here's a pic of a rode end eye I found on the web. Not one of Claude's, but you an compare it to Claude's pic to give you an idea of what they look like.
Have owned 5 rigs but Rig #2 is my current one!
claude #3563 - 4/28/2018 4:36 AM No not at all. If this site was a little more picture posting friendly it would be nice. UGH
Next time I'm in Middleburg we'll have a class in posting pix. It really isn't hard.
Thanks! I did use some of those. Guess I just didn't know what they were called, but probably got the idea from pics posted by people like Al, Claude, Jay and Lonnie. 🙂 Except mine are eye bolts I guess, male ends, so I didn't realize they were what was being suggested.
