You want HOW much ?1*?!!

Hmmm...roughly £7?

Mark

Current LR list is £7.61 inc VAT

Richard

So my local rip-off merchants were cheap at £7.48 inc VAT!

How that sort of price can be justified is beyond me even after paying Gordon Brown, for the glass palace showrooms and armies of 'sales persons'. Quite frankly it's extortionate.

TBH I've bought a few studs for various non-Landrover cars, and that price seems par for the course, still expensive for what they are but not out of the ordinary!

It makes buying a die seem quite worthwhile! I justified (to myself) the purchase of my first lathe that way, reckoned the payback time on a single restoration would make sense if I made all the necessary bolts myself.

Karen

A lathe would be great, I've long ago justified buying one, unfortunately the space to set one up and to do some metalworking is more expensive in this country than the tools are :-(

Some studs though are designed to stretch and reach an elastic point where they can maintain pressure between the two items being attached during expansion and contraction cycles, especially on things like cylinder heads. Not sure how easy it is to get that right on a home setup.

Often the hard part is sourcing the right materials - for example, when I left the UK in the early 80's I purchased a stock of imperial sizes of imperial hexagonal stock in EN16T that I simply could not replace easily now. But I bought enough so that with careful rationing it'll last out my lifetime, other than the 7/16" & 1/2" that's already long gone. cost me a heap of ££'s even then.

Karen

So can you not fire the lathe up and machine yourself some new bolts and nuts? I realise that it's going to take a while to make each one but if they're hard to find...

(No I don't know anything about what's involved, if that's not already obvious, other than just mildly educated guesswork)

What's a Bydo? In what way is the empire evil? Why should we blast off and strike it?

I'm not blasting off and striking anything without some answers.

The Bydo are a man-made race of beings designed as a weapon to defend us against enemy aliens from another dimension, unfortunately some nit set them loose in our own dimension where they attacked us. We defeated them but they secretly built up an evil empire out of our sight and are now intent on destroying us. We must defeat them!

Pilot your ship to the Bydo world and destroy the Queen. Instruction manuals can be found here;

Get cracking soldier!

Shouldn't that be :

Richard

My point exactly, that's how I justified the expense of a lathe. However if you don't start with the right hex stock to begin with, you have to mill the flats on yourself, which is just plain tedious. But I've been known to do it, for example when I purchased my current Fairey capstan winch it did not have the dog to go into the front of the crankshaft. A couple of hours on the lathe made the dog, and then I purchased the appropriate thread of bolt & milled the flats down to an A/F size that was spanner-compatible & yet still fit into the inside of the dog with space for a socket on the head. All up around 4 or 5 hours work.

The alternate was passing up on a perfectly good winch that's served me for years now.

Karen

What would worry me is the necessary heat treatment of some fastners - hardening/tempering is very hard to do without some serious kit.

Steve

Ah sorry, I told you I didn't know owt about lathing yet, so I missed your reference to getting stock, hence my question that boiled down to "Why don't you do what you just said you do?"

In my case, I now have two cars that are well past most people's junk-by date (a 33-year old and a 17-year-old, with a 45-year-old on the cards), so parts are either hard to find, expensive or just not available. Metalworking skills will help a lot when trying to keep an old beast on the road.

Plus of course there's the fun of watching the bit take shape!

Karen Gallagher wrote: > you have to mill the

If you have the cash spare, get one of the collet block sets from the likes of J&L tools. - they have a six sided collet block, and with about

Steve

I use an indexing head - can't run to a dividing head as I never cut gears (yet) and hence that's all I can justify to myself. But I'll see if a collet block set such as that is available here in Oz, sounds useful.

Karen

I'll see what I can find at work, regarding order codes and some piccies. There is a great suite of bits and pieces, all based on this collet collection, and its easy to knock up special fixtures - you can even chuck square stock perfectly with the right collet.

Steve