junk nuts and bolts

[John *.?-!.* cub owner]

Our local farm supply carries the Hillman line of hardware which has traditionally been good quality, but lately it is getting bad. Last week I bought a turnbuckle that was marked 1/2" x 6" to put on the chain to level my newest flail when I lift it, and when I went to put a jam nut on it I Neither an SAE or metric nut would screw on it. Both would start, but neither would go on all the way. The screw in end was not 1/2" as marked, but apparently 18mm, which is very close to 1/2, but neither my SAE and Metric thread gauges would match it.

Yesterday I picked up 6 carriage bolts 1/2x2 along with 6 nuts. 2 of the carriage bolts had bad threads and one of the nuts. That makes 3 bad of 12 units, or a 25% failure rate.

[Dale Finch]

When the local ACE Hardware store turned into Town and Country they had had a fairly decent selection of nuts and bolts. When I was installing the engine cover on my '55 Cub this past year, I was torqueing the bolts to (I think) 20 lbs, and one of them seemed to just keep going without getting tight (using a torque wrench that was good). I carefully backed it out, and it had started to "stretch". I then removed all of them and found that over half were NOT the Grade 5 they were supposed to be. I know...I should have examined more carefully!! I took the entire batch of hardware back to them and the first thing I realized was that they didn't even know what Grade 5 or 8 bolts were! We finally figured out that the supplier had substituted Grade "whatever" for the Grade 5's. They were absolutely worthless...20 lbs torque is NOTHING!

[Stanton]

John, take them back and explain it to the hardware store manager. Insist they report back to Hillman. Things change when enough people object to an inferior product.