The Semi-Unofficial Pistol-Forum Car geek, gearhead, hot rodder, and vehicle thread

[Welder]

Ha, I literally just used the butane for some heat shrink and a little bit of soldering earlier.

The propane is one of those I have, because I found it when I was sorting through my dad's stuff.

I grew up on the oxy-acetylene torch for brazing copper lines and even low-grade, non-structural welding (though, obviously, a MIG/TIG/Arc are vastly superior for actual structural stuff).

Yea, if I have to go to the torch, a medium blue flame and five minutes should do it. Hopefully, I won't, because there are some almost 60-year old dry ass rubber bushings in those control arms that I really would prefer to not ignite...

That reminds me, when I grab an extension cord from Home Depot tomorrow, I need another fire extinguisher.

I can ease your mind on a couple of things.

First, assuming you have a cutting attachment on the torch and not a lame little oxy-acetylene welding tip, it should only take about 10-20 seconds of properly applied flame to get the nut hot enough to get off of there. Along with this, remember you don't need to heat the entire nut red hot...any old wrench flat will usually do. Unless the nut is bigger than 1-1/2", I never heat more than a flat or two for removal purposes.

Second, it's unlikely you'll get much more than smoke from your bushings unless you're applying WAY too much heat over WAY too long of a time, but even if you do, whack the flame with your welding glove a time or two and it'll go right out. All of the rubber I've ever caught on fire didn't really want to stay lit. Definitely don't waste a good in-date and charged fire extinguisher on something like that. Although not having such a fire extinguisher is also not a good idea.

Good luck man! Having a functional blue wrench really opens up a lot of options, especially on cars living in your neck of the woods.

[RJ]

I have a car service coming up, and need some advice on choosing the size on a service jack. For a car weighing 3,150 lbs, what size jack would you choose, from the range of 2T, 2.5T, 3T or 4T?

I want it to do the job safely, and will be elevating the car onto four quality jackstands (e.g. Esco). I currently have a 1.5T which I bought for another, lighter car. I’d feel better lifting the car with a jack with more reserve capacity; because snugging the 1.5T up to the jacking points and taking some weight, it’s clear that jack is near it’s limits. Failing mid lift is not what I want, obviously.

I’m just not sure what would be considered adequate? Or is there a rule of thumb I can use?

[OlongJohnson]

Overkill, but I used to have access to one of these.

https://www.pelicanparts.com/catalog...yd1-detail.htm

Never had more control of the lowering. I loved that thing.

[RJ]

Overkill, but I used to have access to one of these.

https://www.pelicanparts.com/catalog...yd1-detail.htm

Never had more control of the lowering. I loved that thing.

Appreciate the suggestion, I’ve not heard of AC jacks. I’d need to validate the tongue would fit in my ‘special’ “Jackpoint” jack stands.

Do you think a DK20 (2.0 tonne) would be adequate for 3,153 lbs car or would I need to go bigger?

[OlongJohnson]

I would have no worries. Pelican is good people, I wouldn't hesitate to pick up the phone and ask them about anything they sell.

[Welder]

I had to look up those jackstands to understand what you were talking about with a floor jack fitting them....now I see.

I'll probably get in trouble for saying this, and maybe this isn't the audience that would most appreciate it, but Horrible Fright actually stocks decent floor jacks for the money. Hear me out. In my job, I sometimes have to destroy tools. I know which ones it'll be ahead of time, so I always buy the cheapest I can get by with for that purpose. I've now accumulated 6 or 8 HF bottle jacks and 3 floor jacks which I haven't managed to destroy when I thought I would. This stuff has sat out in the rain, been welded to (don't do that at home), been used out of position, been hoisted 50' in the air and thrown around hooked to a chain, you name it. Grinding dust all over it including on the cylinder rods, overloaded, and I'm still using it.

Since I'm doing the anecdotal thing, I'll even go one better and mention that I have two Enerpac items (one bottle jack and one porta-power pump set) that are leaking and useless until I rebuild them. Enerpac is top, top quality stuff, if you're unfamiliar, and a porta-power set can set you back a few thousand. I think the set I have right now retails near $5k. The HF porta-power is more of a get-what-you-pay-for thing, and the one time I bought one, I nearly immediately destroyed it. Have also destroyed several sets of HF jackstands, but again from abuse.

I guess my point is, you can spend what you want, but for what you're doing, I personally wouldn't dump a bunch of money into it. You've got jack stands, so the jack doesn't really need to hold any weight long term, and jacks don't really fail catastrophically (insert anecdote here, but seriously, they don't). They just leak down, really slowly at first. As far as size, for easy pumping effort it's nice to have a jack rated around 2x your load. The typical vehicle being front heavy means you might be lifting 2k lbs at the front end at most on a 3k lb vehicle, so a 2T jack would be fine. But I have also knowingly overloaded HF floor jacks, enough to force them into bypass, and they'll take a fair amount more than their rated load before the bypass opens. And afterward, they still don't leak down under continued, more 'normal' use.

I could talk about this kinda stuff all day, but y'all would get bored LOL.

[Welder]

I was reminded of this old YT video today. The dyno pull of a custom-built 24V71 Detroit diesel. 3400 hp LOL. All those cylinders, and it still has that distinct Detroit 2-stroke sound...a couple of the first trucks I learned to drive had 6-71's in 'em. They were real screamers. None of them had the power to match the sound and smoke, but I remember being 12, driving those old Internationals and just waiting for whichever one I was in to blow up (never happened). Pretty sure they had a manual emergency air shutoff in the event one started running away, because shutting off the fuel wouldn't stop it. Times were crazier then.

This one here has the power to match the sound.

https://youtu.be/m48vyc5beNg

[RJ]

I had to look up those jackstands to understand what you were talking about with a floor jack fitting them....now I see.

I'll probably get in trouble for saying this, and maybe this isn't the audience that would most appreciate it, but Horrible Fright actually stocks decent floor jacks for the money. Hear me out. In my job, I sometimes have to destroy tools. I know which ones it'll be ahead of time, so I always buy the cheapest I can get by with for that purpose. I've now accumulated 6 or 8 HF bottle jacks and 3 floor jacks which I haven't managed to destroy when I thought I would. This stuff has sat out in the rain, been welded to (don't do that at home), been used out of position, been hoisted 50' in the air and thrown around hooked to a chain, you name it. Grinding dust all over it including on the cylinder rods, overloaded, and I'm still using it.

Heh. You may or may not notice the HF 1.5T Aluminum Racing jack in this picture: I have happily used many a coupon at the Wall o' Chinese Tools Store.



I think I may be ok for now, especially since I'm just jacking up a side (quarter, really) of the car at a time. But if say $400 drops from the sky sometime, I'll be ordering an AC DK20Q in a heartbeat.

[RJ]

I would have no worries. Pelican is good people, I wouldn't hesitate to pick up the phone and ask them about anything they sell.

Yep.

I ran into one of the original owners of Pelican at a car show in Amelia Island in March. Nice guy. I told him I wanted to see where all the money I spent on parts for my 330i ZHP over eight years went. But yeah, they do sell good stuff. Besides the online specialty/brand car parts web sites for my particular case, Pelican is my go-to for German car parts, usually.

I had only one negative part purchase experience in 100k miles on my bimmer: The cooling system on an E46 sucks, to be blunt. It is full of parts that are sketchy at best. I ended up treating them all as lifed components; water pump, expansion tank, thermostat, hoses, etc. were all swapped out at intervals prior to failing. So one time, I had replaced the expansion tank for I think the second time. The part I ordered from Pelican was supposed to be an OEM BMW part, but the one that arrived had no markings (at all), no BMW stamp, no imprinted letters. Hmmm. I installed it anyway, since I was putting the car back together that weekend.

Well, a few thousand miles later, I was dating again after my divorce. I had a met a lady and she and I were at church in Winter Park FL, when I came out to drive home. Start up the car, get a "low coolant" light, immediately. Well this can't be good, says I. Step out (in my good clothes, of course) and pop the hood. Yep. Coolant leaking everywhere. The damn tank had split a seam. Crap.

After an hour or so to arrange a truck, I had to get the car flat bedded home to my garage. I went to the dealer and paid through the nose for an OEM tank, with BMW on it in big letters. Lesson learned: Use cheap aftermarket parts at your peril, or be prepared for the consequences.

I guess my date was ok with the experience; she ended up marrying me anyway.

[OlongJohnson]

I had only one negative part purchase experience in 100k miles on my bimmer: The cooling system on an E46 sucks, to be blunt. It is full of parts that are sketchy at best. I ended up treating them all as lifed components; water pump, expansion tank, thermostat, hoses, etc. were all swapped out at intervals prior to failing. So one time, I had replaced the expansion tank for I think the second time. The part I ordered from Pelican was supposed to be an OEM BMW part, but the one that arrived had no markings (at all), no BMW stamp, no imprinted letters. Hmmm. I installed it anyway, since I was putting the car back together that weekend.

Well, a few thousand miles later, I was dating again after my divorce. I had a met a lady and she and I were at church in Winter Park FL, when I came out to drive home. Start up the car, get a "low coolant" light, immediately. Well this can't be good, says I. Step out (in my good clothes, of course) and pop the hood. Yep. Coolant leaking everywhere. The damn tank had split a seam. Crap.

After an hour or so to arrange a truck, I had to get the car flat bedded home to my garage. I went to the dealer and paid through the nose for an OEM tank, with BMW on it in big letters. Lesson learned: Use cheap aftermarket parts at your peril, or be prepared for the consequences.

My E36's tank let go on the track at Buttonwillow. I as able to epoxy it together well enough to get home. The first aftermarket replacement also split, if I remember. The second was OK as long as I had the car. Some aftermarket stuff was good, some was not. But remember, the stuff you're replacing prematurely is the BMW stuff, too. Had a neighbor with a really clean E28 M5. There was a little plastic doohickey underhood that held hoses or something and had let go after 15 years. He could've just put a zip-tie on it, but he wanted to do it right. So he paid $15 at the dealer for the OE part. What he got was a plastic bag with a BMW label and a zip-tie in it. Apparently, BMW had decided that a zip-tie was good enough.

There's a big thread on Bimmerforums about deleting the cooling fan on E36s before it explodes and takes out the cooling system. Mine never did that. One time I had a well-known independent shop in SoCal work on it. We'll skip why I was back there asking them for a new fan, but when they went to put it in, rather than taking three minutes to undo the handful of fasteners and lifting the shroud so it could be installed the right way, as I had always done, they just flexed it until it could be jammed in without disturbing any of that stuff. When I suggested they be a little more conscientious about it, they told me that's how they always did it. I concluded that not all BMW parts replacements are due to the parts.

The other well-advertised independent BMW shop in the area once did some tranny work. They installed the output shaft flange without bothering to use Loctite on the threads of the nut that holds it on. It turns out that the Loctite's real function is to seal the leak path through the threads. I ended up with ATF all over the underside of the car, as well as ATF taking out the guibo. Wasn't happy when I got it all apart and figured out where the leak was coming from.

Anyway, just a couple more boring stories to explain why I have so many tools.