I Hate Captured Nuts!

The weather has finally cooled off enough for me to get serious about doing the paint work on my M35. The cab on the 1952 Gasser is rusted real bad and not worth saving. So is the one on my 1953 Gasser. So was the dropside truck cab that came in the back of one of the trucks. The dropside cab is now fodder for Sermis to make a 4 door out of. Kwai found a Gasser cab in California some months back and it is completely rust free. That is what is gonig on my truck.

When the cab showed up I noticed 5 of the 6 front fender bolts had been torched off. No problem I thought, I will just weld a nut on there and pull them on out. Well, now that I have the cab entirely stripped I did a final count. 19 brocken off bolts in all. 6 of which I did pulling off the doors, windshield and drivers seat. The rest are fender mounts, cab mounts or transmission tunnel cover bolts.

I don't mind broken bolts if all it means is drill and tap or weld and turn. But, on most of them the captured nut is loose too. The easy way seems to be to grind/cut/torch the captured nut off and just flat weld in a new one. But, that seems kind of wrong to me. I really don't want to spend days making the captured nut cages either. Any ideas?

Thanks.

Just weld the nuts. It's what the military would have done, unless they were real lazy and just put a loose nut on it. I wouldn't worry too much about duplicating the factory look unless you are going for a "hot off the assembly line" restoration. K.I.S.S. Your nerves will thank you for it, lol.

Tim, if you need a bag of captured nuts, I think I saw some last night, let me know.

Been there many times....! (half a century takes its toll on those old gassers...)

On the door hinges and other critical areas I don't even try to force them before heating the bolt head red hot and let it cool down. It sure helps!

G.

Good tip Gringel! I do the same. Rusty 1980's CUCV nuts do the same thing. I snapped off three nuts inside the fender of my 1009. I just MIG'd some new ones in place and called it good. Since the nut tore the sheetmetal around the original mount, I welded a washer that was wider than the hole to the nut and then welded the whole thing to the fender. It gets a little hot holding it in place while you weld it so I thread a long bolt into the new nut and then weld it while holding the bolt.

After the bolt cools, an extra trick that's worked well for me is to first tighten the bolt ever so slightly; just enough to get it started moving. That direction stacks the threads in their stronger direction. (Think of a coil spring when you turn it in the direction the coils wind).

A few of the trucks I have worked on have had the nuts strip or break off were the fender bolts to the cab inside the rocker panel. My solution to this is to take a piece of quarter inch thick band iron and drill 3 holes in it to match up with the bolt holes in the cab. I then weld 3 nuts over the holes on one side and when I remount the fender I slide it into the rocker.The old nuts must be removed first. It is easy to do and you get some flexability in lining up the fender.

Well, it has been two weeks and I have "fixed" 15 of the 19 trouble spots mentioned in the first post.

The tunnel cover captured nuts were just a matter of a chisel and hammer to cleanly knock off the bad ones followed by a new nut welded on in the center of the hole.

The pictures below will say more than any words I can write about the fender to cab mount bolts.

I just came in from painting the bottom and will get pictures Monday.

Well, I forgot that my work will not have internet access Monday, so I went out and took pictures tonight. These are the patched up sections after I got them painted a decent color. I couldn't get a grinder to a good bit of the welds and basically don't care because they are water tight and nobody will probably ever see them once the cab is mounted on the truck. Same thinking on the undercoating. I degreased and power washed the thing. Any stuff left on the truck will only help deaden sound and should hold paint just fine.

I had a couple of those captive nuts that were so rusted the bolts could not be undone and the nuts ended up spinning in their holders due to me trying to unscrew them. To replace the fender, it took about 2 hours to hacksaw through the bolts. No torch or power tools were available! Had to make a hacksaw blade grip and use the end of the saw.. went through a few blades. They are good otherwise. just the ends are woen smooth. That's real nice work you are doing there.

OK Mr. Barr, is that painted undercoating or green undercoating? We want details.

Chris,
Below is what the cab floor looked like when I first started working on it a few weeks ago. Lots of oil and grease. I used a scrub brush and whatever that purple degreaser stuff Castrol makes is called to get most of the junk off. Then I borrowed a friends pressure washer to try and knock whatever I could off. I figured anything still there will stay another 50 years or so and just painted over it with Gillespie 24052.

Oh, since the file name for the pictures shows, I had to figure out a way to keep all the different parts seperate in my mind. So, since the cab came from California, it is the C35 cab which is going to fit on the M35(r) truck compared to going on my M35(p) truck.

So in short, the texture is just whatever crap you didn't feel like messing with? I see.

Yep!