tourenwagen

A few nights ago, I looked a long and hard to find a vendor with a thread file in stock, and the ability to ship quickly. Indeed, I got the shipment quickly — with the thread file shown as backordered. Nice. But I did get the metric and anti-metric thread gauges.

The thread files were plan B anyway. Plan A was to replace the rod end with the damaged thread. Since I wasn’t sure if the rod end was left hand thread or right hand thread, I ordered one of each. The package shipped and arrived a day later than promised, but arrived yesterday with a total of four rod ends — two left and two right. But the left hand threads rod ends came without a stud pressed into the ball joint, which made them useless.

But I still had a fifty percent shot.

Upon closer examination, the bad rod end has a left hand thread. Bummer … or words to that effect.

However, having my trusty thread gauges, I could tell definitively that the damaged stud has 24 threads per anti-metric unit of distance. It’s just not right to have a 3/8″ x 24 threads-per-inch fastener installed on a German car, but that’s what it is. Prior the having the thread gauges I wasn’t sure if I was dealing with metric fastener sized at 10mm x 1 or an anti-metric fastener sized at 9.525 mm x 1.058333333… (Can you tell by now that I hate using the units formerly known as English when doing mechanical work?)

The threads are just a little messed up, and I felt that I could probably force a nut onto the stud, but I wasn’t about to use force without being certain about what nut to use. But, being certain, and having a hardened nut, and scrounging up anti-metric wrenches that fit, I did use force. And it worked.