More Pakistan Scary

Steering ball joints this time


YouTube

Wonder who the US distributor is? At least it has a high quality bush!

They are just for a farm tractor. It seems most of the videos I see their tractors are so overloaded the steering wheels barely touch the ground and all steering is done with the wheel brakes anyway.

Yeah, he shoulda just run down to the autozone and bought a new one.


Compared to some of the crap you see on biker TV shows and the like, this guy is an artist.

Really if the guy owned a mig welder and a chair, would you find it particularly scary?

Raise your hand if you were wondering where you could get bushings like that.....

As seemingly crude as his methods are to those who have the luxury of purchasing new parts without even leaving the house, you have to give the guy credit for his ability to repair something completely clapped out back to usable. Until their brothers the Afghani's got Kalashnikov's, they were pretty good at making scratch built enfields by hand with no machine tools, much to their enemies dismay. Jim

Third world stuff is a real eye opener. I thought this video was well done with tasteful music and no silly commentary. The methods are crude to us but those folks don't have our resources and have become creative and self sufficient.

My brother lives in Mexico, which I wouldn't consider 'third world', but some of the tales he tells me of various forms of infrastructure construction and the such would make you wonder.

I watched a video of a pretty sophisticated tea bagging machine being run somewhere in China. PLC's, conveyors, proximity lights and all kinds of do-dads, it wasn't a homemade contraption. When the tea bags were finished, where do you think they went? Right down a chute to be dumped in a pile on the floor where a bunch of folks, squatting, stuck them in packages..HUH!

Stuart

Man...the first few seconds of the video show him chucking it up in a three jaw with the "leg" sticking out. I would be afraid to death of having my face smashed in when the chuck lets loose. Maybe in Back Gear it would be fairly safe but at that speed ? Not me !

There's a vehicle machinery inspector's office across the road from a mate's workshop that has a "wall of shame" including steering components tacked together with chickenshit welds. My Dad was working on a Hiller helicopter in a rural area and found the owner with one of the machine's rod ends: He had it in the hydraulic press crushing the body to try and take the slop out of the worn out unit. He could have had an identical part from the local bearing shop at any time for less than $20.

I have rebuilt many ball joints by similar methods, usually use a bronze overlay applied by oxyacetylene torch rather than a plastic insert. Die grinder or cape chisel to remove the swage for disassembly.

I did not see a pre-load spring in the video, which is hard to replace if it is badly pitted or broken. If it is just squashed, I have annealed, stretched, and re-tempered it.

atomarc said:

I watched a video of a pretty sophisticated tea bagging machine being run somewhere in China. PLC's, conveyors, proximity lights and all kinds of do-dads,

Click to expand...

Must have been for export, we just pour water over the leaves Third replenishment is the best, first one is too strong, second not as bad but third time is just right.

I liked it, right up until he spray painted the taper and threads. Otherwise seems ok, it's a tractor. You can tell he's put in a few thousand hours in on that lathe, he'd shift the toolpost position so fast I had to go back to see it.

There is a really scary youtube on the Pakistani Truck Channel about the repair of a heavy truck rear end. The wheel spindle had broken off at the end. The Pakistani mechanics set the rear end up in the same belt drive lathe and chuck the undamaged side's spindle. Seeing a whole truck rear end flying around in the lathe with no counterbalance weights is something I found amazing. The mechanic cuts a 'vee' in the damaged spindle where it meets the flange on the rear end's body. He does not part it off completely. The rear end is then landed on the ground and the damaged spindle is broke off with a sledge hammer. A partial replacement spindle section (maybe cut from another similar rear end with even more damage) is bevelled in the lathe. The rear end goes back into the lathe and the repair section is jigged onto the rear end using the tailstock to support it and hold things in line. Welding is done with a bent electrode and hand held shield, no ground clamp anywhere in sight.

After the first few stitch welds go in, the mechanic rotates the rear end in the lathe by hand and hits it with the sledge to knock down any bowing. He runs multiple stitch welds to tie the repair spindle section to the rear end while it is in the lathe. The rear is then taken out of the lathe, placed on home-made roller stands on the ground, and the welding is completed. The mechanic uses a really wide weave for the welding, apparently never having heard about limiting the width of a weave bead.

When the welding is finally done, the rear is checked again for any bowing, and is straightened in a hydraulic press located outside of the shop.

When the rear end repair is completed, two men in the usual sandals or slippers heave the rear end onto a well worn and beat-up hand truck and schlepp it over dry and dusty dirt yards and roads to the truck repair location.

Seeing a heavy truck rear spinning in a lathe that is way too light for the job and with no balance weights is something I'd not have believed had I not seen it on this particular youtube. I am curious as to what welding electrode the Pakistani mechanics use. Apparently, the flux is durable enough to allow the electrodes to be bent. I am guessing the Pakistani mechanics have nothing more than AC transformer welders (aka "Buzz Boxes"), and the electrode may be something like 7014 to get the high deposition rate and make those extra wide weave beads. Whatever the electrode is, the mechanics seem to run it fairly hot and get what appears to be a clean weld with good tie-in and no visible (at least in the youtubes) porosity or undercut. Whatever they are using, it seems to work well enough to hold their truck frames and other critical parts together.

On the Pakistani truck channel, there is also a youtube about the rebuilding of tie rod ends. This is in a truck repair shop. The mechanic opens up the worn tie-rod end and pops out the ball. He does some weld buildup on the worn surfaces, and uses what looks like a 'rugged' ball end mill chucked in a drill press to restore the spherical seat in the ball joint end. The drill press has the name "Solid" cast onto it, though it appears anything but. The ball end mill (or maybe just a large twist drill with the end lips ground to the approximate radius) chatters and the whole drill press shakes and groans. The ball is restored by some freehand work with a file in the lathe. The mechanic puts plenty of grease into the ball joint's 'cup' and seats the ball. He then places the spring and cover disc on the ball and uses a press to compress and hold things in place. Once has things where he wants them, he welds the cover plate back onto the ball joint body. Smoke from the grease pours out, but the job is done. Back onto a heavy truck it goes. Who knows how accurately the radius's and profiles of the ball and the socket it fits into on those ball joints really are after those rebuilding methods ? A few hundred Km on the Pakistani roads, rough as they are, will wear down any rough spots or sticking points in those rebuilt tie rod ends.

Frame repairs and lengthening are even wilder to watch on the youtubes. Frame channel sections are bent in one guy's shop on some ingenious home made hydraulic presses. If a frame section has a transition to it, layout is done on steel plate and the plate is burned to shape using a torch and freehanding it. The Pakistanis using the torches never seem to wear gloves or burning goggles (let alone a dark face shield). They work in their slippers or sandals. The burned edges of the plates seem nice and straight, and are slicked off with an unguarded large angle grinder by a guy with neither goggles nor closed footwear. The plates go into the hydraulic press and the mechanics in that shop do turn out some nice looking frame channel sections. Whether they use a higher strength alloy steel than ordinary structural grade is unknown. When the channel sections are braked to shape, delivery is often made by a young fellow with a three-wheeled motorcycle. This is some lightweight machine, not even as heavily built as an old Harley or Indian 3 wheeler. They load the channels onto the three wheeler any which way they can, and if had any suspension, it is bottomed out. The kid wriggles in between the channel sections and rides off to make the delivery.

Drilling holes in truck frames is done using a heavy electric drill motor with a Morse-taper spindle. A chain and a piece of lumber are used as a lever to force the drill into the work while the guys hang onto it. Re-riveting of truck frames is done by placing the rivets cold in the holes and heating the projecting shank with a cutting torch. When the projecting shank is red hot, one mechanic peens it with a heavy sledge. When he has peened and started to form a head on the shank, his buddy places a rivet snap on it and this is sledged to form the head. Bucking the rivets is done using a kind of jackscrew to hold the rivet snap in place on the factory-made head of the rivet. Working on truck frames, there are plenty of places to setup a jackscrew and snap to buck rivets.

Another beaut is a youtube of the installation of a transmission in a heavy truck. The youtube refers to this as 'with feet'. They meant it. A mechanic gets on his back under the transmission and raises his legs, pushing up on the tranny with his feet to work it in to place and get things lined up. When a transmission jack is used in other youtubes, it is an ancient thing worked by a screw and gearing rather than hydraulics. On the other hand, the same mechanics do have a very modern hydraulic all-terrain crane on hand and make good use of it. It is a study in contrasts to watch the Pakistani truck mechanics at work. No air impact wrenches, no air hammers, no personal protective equipment (PPE), working out on bare ground with plenty of dust and dirt to 'grind in the parts' they reassemble, not even a good welding shield. But, they do have a modern hydraulic crane at their disposal.

A whole other subject is the decoration and artwork on the Pakistani trucks. This seems to be at least as important, if not moreso than the actual condition of the truck itself. It's quite obviously a very different culture than what most of us are accustomed to. As I've said previously, I give the Pakistani mechanics and truckers a lot of credit for what they accomplish under their prevailing conditions.

Hey we all got to piss with the cock we got, I have a lot of respect for guys like this. Just getting it done with whats available.

Machining and welding go way back in my family, I've got a picture of my grandfather in the shop from the 50's running a grinder and in the background you can see other guys running lathes and drill presses and not a pair of safety glasses in sight. Pop once told me a story about how they used to dip coffee mugs and the coffee pot in the pail of Trichloroethane they used for cleaning parts prior to welding and brazing. He said he was real bummed that you can't get it it anymore because it "cleaned like nothing else!".

I appreciate that I live and work in a much safer and healthy world than he did but I understand that it was built at great risk. Ole Hadri is building that world for those that will follow him and he has my respect for that.

It looks like he knows what he is doing, and as said above he is good with his lathe.
Now only if USA farmers did that quality of repair work we would never have coined the phrase "farm repair"

There is a franchise outfit called "Axle Surgeons" in this country that sets you up to replace buggered spindles on the road.

I helped a guy once splice the middle section from a heavier rear-end into his truck, keeping the smaller ends to fit his spring u-bolts and hubs...I no longer remember why he wanted to do this, but IIRC we checked alignment with wire pulled taut through the assembly from spindle-to-spindle, and I did the welding for him. We had a time finding axle shafts with correct length and splines, and had to weld new flanges on them to fit his hubs.

This was in West Virginiastan, back in the early 1990's

I have successfully convinced a half dozen or more farmers and rural repair shop owners that there's no economy in hacking shit together like that.

I've made several really nice one-off spindles for heavy farm machinery on CNC lathes. Hundreds of shafts with keyways in TGP. Farmers love TGP. They would swear that shiny stuff makes their implements run smoother. Rebuilt and built new rollers with through-shafts and taperlocks so the shaft can easily be replaced when the ends get destroyed and the damn thing runs true.

The Hazelnut industry is real big here. I swear the nut harvesters were designed and built by one of those Youtube Pakistani fellows. That shit is terrible. 3 miles of roller chain running on 50 sprockets all on bent shafts at 1000+ RPM. 500 lb 18" drums spinning at light speed out of round by 1/4".

I have also found a farmer is an instant best friend for life if they've never heard of JD cornhead grease and I give them a free tube. You'd think I saved their kid's life or something.

I believe Axle Surgeons is a nationwide franchise. Some weld up the old spindle and remachine it on the axle, others cut the spindle off and weld on a new spindle. Tell them in advance what you have and they will bring the correct stub.

As far as balance on a banjo style drive axle, they balance pretty well when turning. Scary as hell when you turn it on. You can learn to tolerate it, but if you get comfortable with it its time to quit.

Looks like Heidri is using the pre-welded jaw chuck for this operation. It reassures me that he survived not having the ball joint rod enter his eye socket at mach 2.1. Nor did
his long shirt sleeves drag him into the danger zone... come to think of it Danger Zone is a more appropriate tune than the lounge lizard track.

I wouldn't consider this a DIY, but it is highly entertaining and it's always good to see someone repairing or building their way up in the world. Osha infractions aside, he's not too far off track.

I'm also glad he made the video dominantly about the job and only did the painting during the credits at the end. Too many "restoration" shows on the 'tube seem fixated on the paint job.

Yes, we see that he can repair that part. Perhaps, with sufficient maturity and experience, he'll understand when you should do so.