Spanners in tractor tool box

Farmer_Joe

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
The North
My understanding is small bolt head’s it can be closer to something, ie near a gearbox flange or something 16mm head gives more room for spanner than a 17 but same m10 thread, same principle with18mm heads and m12 thread.

jap stuff has 14 heads with m 10 thread
 
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Fish

Member
Location
North yorkshire
Well our 750 drill is an eccentric mix of mm and AF, depending where it was designed/built. The case combine (grand island) is almost all mm, but I came across a 3/16 af the other day, wtf.:rolleyes:
 

Tomr10

Member
I always find these fit no matter what
 

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farmerdan7618

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Somerset
while on the subject why do you get some bolts with different sized nuts ?

15mm bolts with 16mm nuts seem to be getting common on cars these days

there must be a reason ? surely?
Was told by a Claas fitter that it is so you only need one set of spanners, rather than the two you would need if they were the same size. Means dealers don't need so many tools to do the job, an extra set of spanners in each van adds up when you have hundreds of vans on the road worldwide.

On performance cars weight reduction is just as plausible.
 

dowcow

Member
Location
Lancashire
My understanding is small bolt head’s it can be closer to something, ie near a gearbox flange or something 16mm head gives more room for spanner than a 17 but same m10 thread, same principle with18mm heads and m12 thread.

jap stuff has 14 heads with m 10 thread

I had to buy two brand new 14mm spanners once to get a rear differential off a Jap car. My old 14mm was too worn, space was too tight to get anything else on. It was bloody stuck, was cursing why didn't they use a bigger head, and subjected my new spanners to the sort of abuse you shouldn't treat any spanner with, especially nice new shiny immaculate ones.
 

farmerm

Member
Location
Shropshire
It seems to be European legislation to have awkward size nuts n bolts on machines now along with torx head screws 🙈
Why stop at just Torx... the other day I needed 2 different sized spanners, a Torx, a allen and a Philips :scratchhead:


Weight reduction

When developing the BMW mini (near 25 years ago now 😭😭😭) it was too fat. Bolt heads were made smaller, it got 4 stud wheels not 5, small flange nuts instead of standard nut and washer, etc etc etc

Amazing how the few grams here and there added up to a couple of hundred kilos lighter prototypes.

Now it's about cost

A smaller bolt head uses less metal, a few cents less production cost. Provided the torque is acceptable, it means more profit!

acceptable torque when new... but deform like butter when slightly seized in and you try to remove them at 5 years old
 

dowcow

Member
Location
Lancashire
I dont like the bolts on mf pto shaft, what are those types of head called? The circlip on the old 6170 was far better!

Yes, agreed they're awful. I think I replaced some with 10.9 Hex I had around for the power harrow when they went missing. Bloody Massey things used to come loose too, seen more than just mine with a PTO stub with its bolts escaping.
 

Sausage

Member
I don’t want to be one of those annoying pedants, but AF just means across flats, whereas whitworth spanners were sized against the thread size rather than the head the later imperial spanners were sized to the head. So your metric spanners are also AF.
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
while on the subject why do you get some bolts with different sized nuts ?

15mm bolts with 16mm nuts seem to be getting common on cars these days

there must be a reason ? surely?
I think it's just so you can attack them with one set of tools, ie if it's a 17/17 then a single roll of ringspanners won't work.
What's even more annoying is when you put a cheap set in the tractor (because they get lost faster than in a workshop) and they are missing one of the sizes you need, I don't think any of my cheapo sets has a 15mm and only one has a 16, they jump straight from 14 to 17 :banghead:

And they wonder why farmers use adjustable hammers for field repairs
 

steveR

Member
Mixed Farmer
It's finally got to the stage here where I can't think of a machine that needs an Imperial spanner anymore. I've finally pulled the Whitworth spanners out of the main toolbox and rendered them to the 'odds and sods' bin in the corner, but some Imperials have metric equivelents, so they can stay, for now. I hope desperately that post Brexit we don't get some nutjob running the country hellbent on de-metrification.

Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ERG mates you mean...!! :oops:
 
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dowcow

Member
Location
Lancashire
Jacob Rees-Mogg and the like you mean!! :oops:

That's the one.... I'm sure he was talking once about pounds and ounces and all that Imperial nonsense. I don't even know how many pounds there are in an ounce. I'm not even sure when we were kids and we used to buy "a quarter of humbugs" what that particular quarter was. Quarter pound? Quarter ounce? It's bad enough when I went looking through the manual for the old crop sprayer and it started talking about fluid oz.... What even is that? Like a pint? A litre?

Back to spanners.... the metric threads are great. Pitch and size and head size all in mili meters... great! UNC BSP UNF etc are just... bloody irritiating. To me at least, and I suspect to most people born in the last 40 or 50 years. 'Thou of an inch' sounds to me like something a Victorian would say when building a steam engine.
 

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