Reply to "Half Shaft Bolts"

I've run into a peculiar situation twice with stock halfshaft bolts. Specifically, the halfshaft bolt split-lock washers fail. On two cars whose owners complained of vibration under acceleration, I found (1)- a loose (or less-than 50 ft-lbs torque) bolt. Tightened and the vibration went away. The second had a missing split-lock washer which broke, then fell out, so one bolt was little more than hand-tight. Again, tightening the bolt 'to feel' (without a torque wrench or washer 'cause we were on the road) fixed the vibration. I stopped using OEM split-locks here.

There are 16 bolts & nuts in the two halfshaft assemblies, and with these two cars st least, only one bolt was looser than the rest & apparently still caused noticable vibration under power.

The same halfshaft bolts can be oriented either with hex-heads inboard or outboard of the flanges. Bolt-heads inboard requires playing with the flange positions to work the bolts into the holes, but once installed they're simple to torque. With the bolts oriented inboard (the 'easy' way), you have to either 'torque-to-feel' or torque the bolt head, not the nut. A 3rd way is to tighten each nut using a crows-foot socket in a torque wrench. Joint torque is likely to be a little different than spec. with method 2 & 3.

Finally, the 16 bolts MUST be unthreaded-shank 11 mm gr-5-equivalent bolts (early cars) or unthreaded-shank SAE 5/8" gr-5 bolts on later ones, with elastic lock-nuts. Ford apparently changed the bolts & nuts at some point during full production. Threaded shanks will pound in due to the thread's greater clearance in the flange holes, and again, there will be vibration. A really touchy area!