jhansen750
Plastic
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2018
Gents, thanks in advance for any experiences you can pass along, I have to believe someone has dealt with this before.
We have support legs that consist of a 3 X 3 x 1/4 wall square tube that is essentially capped both ends. The bottom cap has a 5/8-11 tapped hole for a leveler, and the sides of the tubes have some 1/4-20 tapped holes as well. Note in the pic attached there are two issues, the pierce I think is being done on the hole without a lead in, but maybe what I see in that pic is just the end of the cut, and not the pierce? Also the threads lok flat, not sharp.
After welding by our fabricator these are sent for powder coat where they are sand blasted and powder coated with plugs for the tapped holes. Our powder coater states the sand they use is meant to break down when pressed hard against steel, and that he has not had problems like this before unless it was due to poorly tapped holes to begin with.
The issue we are having is the levelers will lock up in the holes. We have tried a very thick black anti-seize but this seemed to make the problem worse. We thought the problem was trapped sand and or metal shavings from tapping getting on the threads. We added a cut across the corner of the 1/2 in thick bottom plate to allow this junk to get blown out prior to assembly, but our guy spent a half hour doing two legs to get the tubes sufficiently cleaned out that the leveler could be installed by hand. We think material will continue to come out of the tube as long as we feel like trying to get it out, basically there will always be some crap stuck inside there.
We recently shipped legs to a customer that we thought we did a decent job cleaning out (note these legs had bottom plates without the corner cut off so it was difficult to get crap to fall out)..and after installation and adjustment the levelers locked up. The levelers in question are nickel plated.
Any ideas or experience on this would be appreciated. I have a pile of parts at our fabricator awaiting welding until I can come up with answers.
We have support legs that consist of a 3 X 3 x 1/4 wall square tube that is essentially capped both ends. The bottom cap has a 5/8-11 tapped hole for a leveler, and the sides of the tubes have some 1/4-20 tapped holes as well. Note in the pic attached there are two issues, the pierce I think is being done on the hole without a lead in, but maybe what I see in that pic is just the end of the cut, and not the pierce? Also the threads lok flat, not sharp.
After welding by our fabricator these are sent for powder coat where they are sand blasted and powder coated with plugs for the tapped holes. Our powder coater states the sand they use is meant to break down when pressed hard against steel, and that he has not had problems like this before unless it was due to poorly tapped holes to begin with.
The issue we are having is the levelers will lock up in the holes. We have tried a very thick black anti-seize but this seemed to make the problem worse. We thought the problem was trapped sand and or metal shavings from tapping getting on the threads. We added a cut across the corner of the 1/2 in thick bottom plate to allow this junk to get blown out prior to assembly, but our guy spent a half hour doing two legs to get the tubes sufficiently cleaned out that the leveler could be installed by hand. We think material will continue to come out of the tube as long as we feel like trying to get it out, basically there will always be some crap stuck inside there.
We recently shipped legs to a customer that we thought we did a decent job cleaning out (note these legs had bottom plates without the corner cut off so it was difficult to get crap to fall out)..and after installation and adjustment the levelers locked up. The levelers in question are nickel plated.
Any ideas or experience on this would be appreciated. I have a pile of parts at our fabricator awaiting welding until I can come up with answers.