Diesel Fifty Track Adjustment Bolt Repair

Gee whiz, there must be a clanging noise when you walk from the brass clanging together. I would never have trusted rebar to have the strength to hold that spring while taking the bolt out of it. it looks like you did a good job of building the cage and got it apart safely. we always used 3/8" X 1 1/2" flat iron for side straps welded to a 3/4" plate of steel on each end with a hole cut in them for the tie bolt to fit through to build a cage for those big recoil springs.

I have to agree with rmyram that 4- 5/8 rebar is sorta light. At .31 si at a working stress of 20000 psi each rebar would have a 6200 tensile load--so four would be 24,800 lbs--but there is stress concentrations at the bends. I don't know what the spring compression load is on a diesel 50 but i know on my 941b we measured over 28000 lbs on the hydraulic press to compress a new recoil spring. Glad it worked ok for you!

Not quite......last time I checked, grade 40 rebar (40,000 yield) in 5/8" (#5) would be good for 12,400 lb tensile load ea.

Pete--in steel design we never used yield or tensile strength--used the allowable working load--the older bridge design codes allowed 20 ksi for 40 ksi yield--but there are some architect codes that would allow 24 ksi working load for grade 40, there are grade 60 and 80 rebars also but they don't take bends very well.

Working stress design was a more safer and simple way to design. Nowadays with costs so high Load Factor Design is used a lot, and can save substantial money on large quantities of steel.

I wish I owned a large press to handle that sort of work, but I had to use what was on hand. At any rate it held fine and it is now apart so I can put the new bolt in. Don't get me wrong, I did not have any body parts in the line of fire(which you shouldn't anyhow) and if I had any doubts I would not have done it in the first place. I think I will go get a cold beverage now Clank....Clank.... as I walk away from the computer😊

Well done!