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Early Bolt Trivia

Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2019 6:26 pm
by Original Smith
I needed a bolt today to attach the muffler to the frame for a 1915 I just bought. I found one, and I've seen this before too. First it has a rounded shank, as most early bolts do, and the hole is there for the cotter pin, but here is what I saw today, and have seen before too. There is a very, very slight notch on the top of the bolt head, all the way across, that lines up with the cotter pin hole. Is this something Ford did to assist the assembly line workers to install the cotter pin? Not so much for this application, but for others where a castle nut was used. Castle nuts were not used for this particular application, but they still used a plain nut with a cotter pin through the bolt.

Re: Early Bolt Trivia

Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2019 8:58 pm
by R.V.Anderson
I don't believe that Ford ever did this but it was commonly done by owners and garages to aid in getting that pesky cotter pin hole to line up, and not have it be half a day's project for the horse-bound.

Re: Early Bolt Trivia

Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2019 4:44 am
by Wayne Sheldon
I have to be with R V on this one. I have seen bolts like that, but never ones that I believed to have been originally from a model T. I have tried for many years to hoard original model T nuts and bolts and use them on my Ts. One never knows what may have been done fifty or so years earlier, but I have personally removed many hundreds of bolts from chassis and major components, and can't recall seeing such a mark on anything I thought may have been original. I would wonder if maybe Ford did that on some of the first few years of model Ts, and maybe a few bolts carried over one way or another?

I do find the "bolt with a cotter-pin hole but with a non-castle nut " for the nut, yet a cotter pin anyway interesting. I may just change to that on my '15!

Re: Early Bolt Trivia

Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2019 7:04 am
by It's Bill
I do that trick myself, but never to original bolts. Maybe I was a mechanic in a previous life, when those bolts were just bolts?

Cheers, Bill