Maintenance - Tricks of the Trade

[Cheechako]

[QUOTE=Strait Shooter;891175]I too spent my life working in an aerospace manufacturing environment as a tool design engineer.
I sure miss having a full blown machine shop with all the accompanying support available. We'd have made short work of my "little" projects. We made quite a few "experiments".

Yeah, things are a lot harder now! That's funny, I started as a tool design/process/project engineer too! I loved it.

[dohenyboy]

Before you shrink the tubing fill in each end of the tube with 5200 or another good sealant. Messy but keeps the water out even if it gets dunked

[gpdno]

Originally Posted by Cheechako

Yeah, it's the iron content in the 17-4ph etc and 400 series that does it. With 300 series, when work hardened without annealing it tends to realign the grain structure.... which makes it more magnetic. I spent my working life in an aerospace manufacturing environment. Had my guys make a lot of neat boat parts! (One was a 6Al-4V titanium fuel tank for the bilge!) Anyway, I bought a flat bar of 304 stainless to make some parts out of. Typically these bars are cold rolled on the final pass at the mill. The surface was a little rough, but fortunately , due to the cold work, it was so magnetic my guys were able to put it on the surface grinder (a magnetic table holds the metal in place) and grind it smooth before further work. In the end the assembly was annealed in a vacuum furnace & passivated so it came out well.

Yes. A more complete answer. I simply find it annoying when people complain about "cheep stainless steel" rusting. Ive been a mechanical engineer for over 20yr and can tell you the stainless is anything but cheep

And yes, I have a machine shop down the street that I'm always pestering to make parts for my boat. CNC's are wonderful machines

[Wireless1]

Of prime importance is to use a die crimping tool which has a ratcheting action. It will NOT release your crimp until you have applied the correct pressure. They are a bit more expensive but are the ONLY type crimper you should use on marine wiring. The crimps they make are gas tight.

[Nemo55]

Dielectric grease was used Because it was "non conductive", especially in or near a distributor cap.