Kit fixing my clutch ...and other stuff

[cardcrash]

My soldering station, complete with overhead lamp and extraction fan. Somewhat negated by the fact my head was directly over what I was soldering, I think a cross blowing fan might've been more useful here:


Once again I have forgotten to take a 'before' picture. There was a brown 240°C fuse on the unit before which I snipped off:


Replaced it with a 152°C fuse from Maplins (part no. RA17T) as suggested by johne here, not sure why 152°C as opposed to the 240°C but someone else did it and said it worked so I'll just go with the flow for now:


I used a little soldering paste to encourage the join (mmmm, lead and flux fumes) and used as much of the fuse tails as I could, bending them round over themselves to try and keep the heat away from the fuse itself:


After a little tug it seems secure, not the best soldering job in the world, but I've not soldered since college and got a nice bout a shaky hand syndrome during the process.

I've yet to install it back in the car, plus the fixing screw may well still be at Kit's, so will have to report back as to whether it works or not, if not I'll try again with another fuse, and if it still doesn't work I'll just burn the car.

[cardcrash]

Ok, well, as I said, one of my locking wheel nuts was tightened to 3 million Nm and cracked the key trying to get it off, so Kit carefully welded it shut again and came round to try removing the nuts once again.

Here is the key:






And here are the nuts, looking a little worse for wear after 20 years of probable pneumatic rattle gun abuse. Notice the nut to the far left, this was the problem nut, even with the mended key it wasn't having any of it, the soft metal would rather come off in chunks rather than turn. So Kit resorted to the only reasonable means of removal, turn the key 180° and smash it on with a big hammer. Needless to say the nut was satisfactorily removed:

[SE_30]

Problems with your nuts Charlie..

Probably tightened with breaker bars etc over the years. I have to pitch in when getting say a tyre repair done. And the lad goes to use a rattle gun on the locking wheel nut tool. oh no you don't.

[K Simmonds]

Yeah tyre fitting places are the worst culprits when it comes to over tightening wheel bolt's, there's nothing wrong with using a rattle gun to nip up steel nuts/bolts before torquing them up properly with a wrench, usually to 110/120 NM. However the light alloy nut's fitted to high performance cars such as Porsches and RS2's ect should never have a rattle gun applied to them, either to unfasten them or do them up! By rights the same applies to all types of lock nut's/bolts, be it steel or alloy, by their very nature they can't take the same amount of stress as a normal fastening's with six flat side's.

This was an odd one as all the other bolt's (locking or otherwise) on the car were correctly torqued so I have to wonder if this particular nut had seized on the thread in some way, perhaps Galvanic corrosion. Once I'd hammered the nut on it took at least 200NN of force to get the thing to budge and that's after using the old trick of loosening the other fixings a little and rocking the car before nipping them up again to try and help free it off.

I was going to grind the weld back and sleeve the key but given the state of the nuts it didn't seem worth going to any extra bother, they have all seen better day's and are best in the bin.