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Does wiring bolts actually help? I feel like if a bolt is going to come loose enough such that the wire is all that is holding it in then you have a big proble
by heads 3y ago
Does wiring bolts actually help? I feel like if a bolt is going to come loose enough such that the wire is all that is holding it in then you have a big problem already. The wire is just delaying the inevitable.
A bolt is either fastened or it isn’t. If the wire is all that’s left to hold it, then it isn’t fastened and your parts are being held together with a very weak piece of wire.
- RandallBrown 3y agoThe wire is supposed to prevent the bolt from becoming loose.
- kube-system 3y agoThe wire or pin doesn't support any of the load. It is there to prevent any vibration from allowing a nut or bolt to rotate. https://fastenerengineering.com/what-is-a-castellated-nut-and-where-is-it-used/ https://fastenerengineering.com/what-is-a-castellated-nut-an...
- HPsquared 3y agoThe safety wire comes in to prevent a loose bolt from gently unscrewing itself further and completely disassembling itself (which can happen with vibration). You're much better off with a loose bolt, than a missing one. It'll hopefully make itself known somehow (maybe even just visual inspection) while still remaining somewhat attached, which is better than nothing.
- heads 3y agoThanks for the explanation. Does that mean a correctly wired bold should have wires loose enough to allow a loose bolt to give itself away — either through rattling or becoming visibly undone? When I searched for images of wired bolts just now I saw many examples where the wire is done up quite tightly, which doesn’t seem right.
- tass 3y agoI don’t know what Boeing do, but you typically see torque markings on many of these bolts on small planes (and cars, roller coasters, other things). If the painted seal is broken or misaligned, you know the nut has moved.
- bigiain 3y ago> Does wiring bolts actually help? There's different kinds of bolts that get wired, with different kinds of goals and results. My only experience is wiring bolts according to the rules for club racing motorcycles. Some things, like oil sump drain bolts for example, wiring them will stop them backing out so far as to fall our, and while it will probably weep oil if it loosened enough to take ups the writing slack, it wouldn't dump all the oil out quickly. Other things, like axle bolts, if it backs out enough to take up the wire slack, it'll have lost its clamping pressure and that's bad, but not immediately catastrophic. The major axle loads are all in shear so the wheel won't fall off, it'll just get more floppy than it's supposed to be. Long term it'd be bad and cause wear to the point that something would eventually fail, but it'd get you to the end of the race most likely, and hopefully the rider will have felt something odd and gone looking or a post race inspection would have caught it.
- cullenking 3y agoHappened to me once when I was racing an R6 6 years ago. I didn't torque the rear wheel nut, but had put my safety wire clip back through the axle so the nut couldn't back off. Got a warmup lap in and started in on a fast lap during a practice session, and it was immediately obvious something was wrong. Limped back into the pits and found the loose nut. I said a quick prayer to the wiring rulebook (and the people who crashed before that rulebook existed), and inspected everything on the bike.
- robviren 3y agoWe used it in nuclear power so I can say the procedures someone wrote at least believe they can prevent bolt rotation. We also used a lot of loctite.