That Damn Nut

Use a flat blade chisel (or a raggity old flat blade screwdriver.I like old screwdrivers) and a hammer, see if you can move that peened part. cuhulin

Big bar or impact wrench. Either way you just apply torque to break the tab off.

Seems like some people say you should use a small punch to open out the dimple - others just over power it with some big ass force. Persoanlly, I'd use a small punch to open it up as much as possible, then you either use a socket and a big impact gun or a socket, breaker bar and cheater pipe to break it loose. Leaving the tire on the hub with the car on the ground and someone pressing the brakes is a good idea if you don't have the big impact gun.

Lot of internet chatter on what to do....see"

Ed

breaker bar works, but use 3/4", not 1/2". sometimes these things are seized and take some serious leverage to remove. 1/2" tools can break in this situation, and because of the torque wind-up, when they let go, they can cause serious injury.

the other [and probably best] option is to use an impact driver. take the hub cover off, then with the wheel on the hub and on the ground [avoids loading the transmission or hammering the driveshaft joint] impact away.

if you personally don't have impact tools, remove the hub cover as above, then drive over to a shop that does who'll do it for you. then torque it gently and drive home carefully to finish the job.

a junkyard trick where the wheels have already been removed is to jam a big screwdriver into the gap in the caliper so it's stuck in the brake disk vanes. then you can use one of the above tools to remove.

Tim Wescott wrote in news:F7mdnSR58LJo1nPQnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@web-ster.com:

That peened bit is called a "stake". Just use a punch or screwdriver to bend the metal out of the way so you can turn the nut. The metal is soft in the region of the stake.

It's not a great idea to re-use the nut, so you should buy a new one before you start: that nut has a single long thread running its length, so you can't just turn it 180 degrees to get a new stake surface.

As for getting the nut off, you'll probably find yourself at wit's end with frustration trying to grunt it off with a breaker bar, so go to an industrial supply house and rent an electric impact wrench. The nut will be off in seconds with an impact wrench.

> > > >

That's what I do. The last one I had to use a Dremel cutting wheel to cut the 'dimple' out (otherwise known as a "stake")

if it's been peened properly, it's hard to push back out and you risk breaking a punch tip. you can also damage the driveshaft slot. better to just turn the nut - the resistance caused by the peen is trivial in comparison to the nut tension.

to put this another way, it's a coarse thread, and it ends up in the same position as before - re-peening the same spot is unlikely to work securely. best to replace.

if you're stuck and /have/ to re-use, there is a kludge - place the nut face down on a sharpening stone [or even flat concrete], and, rotating every dozen or so strokes, "polish" the nut face. this removes a little material and allows it to set in a different position. provided this new position is a good distance from the previously peened skirt of the nut, it can be safely re-peened. replacing the nut is much better though - among other things, it guaranteed to be square.

indeed - some of them are seized pretty bad. but a 3' 3/4" breaker will do it. if you weigh enough!

1/2" electric impacts seldom go above 300/350 ft.lbs torque. these things can be stuck real bad and don't shift until ~500 ft.lbs or so. that's air tool territory, and even those can hammer away for quite a while before the nut breaks loose. for the untooled, i think it's quicker and easier to pop around to the local shop with some beers and the hub cover already removed. they'll have a sufficiently powerful impact and break it loose for less than the price of an electric rental.

Side question, is it worthwhile to replace the boots on axles once they start flinging grease? Or just wait for the inevitable then replace the unit(s) with aftermarket axles?

I certainly would, if you have the thing apart anyway. If it's slinging grease it means there is a tear or other compromise, and that dirt is getting *IN* as well, and if there's a joint there it's certainly going to wear away the joint. Better an $8-12 boot than a $65-120 axle!

I tried one of those "split boots" you wrap around the old boot. I filled the old boot with grease and clamped the new one in place. I think it made the joint last about 3 weeks longer. I can still drive the car, but it really needs to be replaced.

If you have it apart just replace the axle with a reman/new. If a boot is torn it is going to require a lot of cleaning and new grease along with the new boot. time/price makes the assembly cheaper than the repair parts.

jim beam wrote in news:kvmdnXIDi4VlcnLQnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@speakeasy.net:

I have never seen that happen. The metal of the nut's flange is soft and easy to bend. I have seen the staked area split at one edge when re-staked, but never damage to a tool. Although a tool can damage the groove in the CV joint nose, that damage is well outside of any area that accepts load, so groove-damage is highly unlikely to go much further than cosmetics.

If the nut-flange is so soft that you can just buzz through the stake with an impact wrench, then it's also soft enough to hammer straight with a punch.

But that tears the stake, and will /definitely/ leave you with an un- reusable nut.

True, but it's not strictly a matter of coarse- or fine-thread per se; more precisely it's a matter of how many individual grooves form the thread.

I just went through a bunch of random fasteners I have that range from fine to coarse in different diameters, and they're ALL single-groove. That means ALL of them need to start (and will finish) in the same orientation each time they are removed and replaced.

For a critical fastener like this, I'd rather trust re-using the original stake area than trying to mill it down by hand and ending up with an off- square face. If you drive the stake area out of the groove carefully, you can restake it successfully.

A new nut is best, though.

You may have seen that, but I have not. My 350# DeWalt makes short work of all axle nuts, even ones with ten-years worth of heavy rust on them..

you'll never get an aftermarket axle of the quality of oem honda. if the joint hasn't already been gritted and destroyed, and you're not just after a quick fix, i would definitely re-boot it. it'll take a little bit of work, but honda cv joints last hundreds of thousands of miles if maintained in this way. aftermarket, you're lucky if some of them last 30k

there are a number of how-to's on you-tube, and this topic has been discussed here in the not too distant past.

it's not "that" soft. you need to peen it with a hammer pretty hard to get it in the groove. if it's been done right, trying to get underneath that with a fine pointed punch, especially because the groove is curved, can break the punch.

not always. i have some i can post pics of if you'd like.

you can re-use it if the nut tightens to a different location on the skirt.

there are /very/ few fasteners that use more than one. coarseness determines the angular window you get with any given torque.

indeed.

again, you can get a lot of angular variation on a fine thread, proportionately less for coarse. if you have a 10° window on a 1.5mm pitch thread, that would be nearly 20° on a 0.8mm pitch thread for the same torque range.

that is absolutely the thing NOT to do. the skirt is not very ductile. to re-peen in the same spot makes that region brittle and prone to easy fracture or tearing. ONLY re-use a nut if it can be staked at a completely different point on the skirt.

indeed.

indeed i have. i ended up driving one to my local honda shop and they buzzed it for nearly a minute with air before it broke loose. colorful language broke the air too.

the lightweight one?

You lost me after a while. What kind of Honda uses the spoked wheel?

used to. if you're nostalgic, check this out:

That's the one. Unless you have a Honda 90 stuffed away somewhere....

That is nice looking. I don't ride motor bikes, but even I'd like to have that one. Is it a legite post, or yet another Craigslist scam?

Ed

I had a 50 and a 70 way back when. Also had a 72 Kawasaki 90 and a Hodaka Combat Wombat.

Moved up a bit since then. Now I ride a 'Wing or the Venture Royal