11/17/00 Safety Wire and Horns

If you found the cotter pin story exciting, now I’m working on safety wire! The drive shaft u-joints along with the steering column u-joints needed to be safety wired, so François lent me his safety wire pliers, and gave me a crash course on how to use them. It actually was easier to do than I thought. It still took some bodged up ones for me to get it right, but soon I was getting it to look the way it should. For the steering u-joints, I followed how Ferrari wired the allen nuts.

I remember seeing a book written about nuts, bolts, and fasteners at the book store a few years ago. It was a Barnes and Noble, so I was able to sit down with the book, and read it for a while. I learned quite a lot about nuts, bolts, and even information on safety wire, but I decided if I bought the book, it would be too much in my obsession with cars! Luckily, I still remembered the stuff on safety wire. There’s a certain way the wire should sit on the bolts so if they tried to unscrew, the wire would prevent this from happening. Here’s how it looked on my u-joints.

When I was installing the radiator a few weeks ago, I accidentally chipped some paint off the air horns in the engine compartment. I decided to strip the paint and start over. It turns out the paint that was used on the horns was not prepped very well, and came off easily, so my clumsiness is not totally to blame. A few minutes on the wire wheel, and most of the paint came right off the horns.

Looking at the horns on some of François’ customer cars, I noticed the paint is also different than what was painted on my horn. The color is a translucent scarlet color, something I’m not sure how easy it’s going to duplicate. I’m going to get on the Internet, and seek out the usual suspects to get some answers, and I’ll get back to you.

*Thanks to Jerry who has a sharp eye, he found the wiring on my steering nuckle to be wrong. The safety wire is pulling on the bolt in the counter-clockwise direction, not the way we want it. I guess I wasn’t paying attention! Thanks Jerry!

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