Can too much threadlocker cause parts to fall off? Harley jokes aside...it's not their fault..lol

Have you hit that subscribe button, that notification bell, you're going to be missing out on videos and free prizes and raffles we have coming up. Hey there friends, I wanted to do a quick little video on a tip that is especially important, especially for newbies, but might be a good reminder for people that have been around turn wrenches for a bit too. And that's when you're working with holes, let me zoom in here, that are blind. Like you're going to put a fastener in here and there's no exit here. You can see it's just casted solid. So let's kind of back up and take a look at what we're doing is we are installing the front fender and front end, if you will, on this Harley-Davidson. And when, when you go to put these, these bolts in, if you look at what Harley says to do, they're actually just going to use these brackets. They're not use a thread locker. They're going to bend this over, torque it to a certain spec. I think it was 16 to 20 foot pounds. Uh, uh, I'm going off memory. I gotta review it in my service manual over there, but anyway, you're going to, uh, torque that to spec and then you're going to find a flat spot on here. You can see the old one. Let me put a bolt through here. You could see an old one that once it was lined up, they bent, uh, bent that tab over to hold it in place. Okay. Well, you're going to be hard pressed to find most Harley-Davidson technicians or riders to not want to put thread locker on about every fastener. I'm making a mess here. Every fastener that they, uh, work with on these sometimes good and sometimes bad. Okay. And in this case, we can actually get us into trouble because what'll happen is as the bikes worked on, this is a 2003 as the bikes worked on. So he takes it off, puts it on, takes it off. What happens is all that thread locker ends up getting built up down inside there. And then eventually what will happen is that fastener cannot actually physically go through the hole enough to clamp the space of whatever it's trying to clamp. So in this case, we're clamping through, let me just speed this up here. We're clamping through that bracket. Okay. Right there. And then there's also a washer that goes between the fork and the fender and so on. So we need the distance of all of that to be able to clamp down. So the, this bike is a classic example where there's been, uh, quite a few, you know, services on this apparently because these bolts do not want to go in all the way. So I'm going to show you real quick what that kind of looks like here. So this one I've already cleaned. I'm going to show you here in a second how I do it. This is a thread chaser. I'll talk about this more in a second, but just let me make a point here of how you'll know something's wrong. Uh, you should always, you know, hand fit your fasteners. I took a little wire brush and cleaned it off good when it was out and in my hand. But if I take a look at this, okay. And I got that to where it's just bottoming out. Okay. Now I'm going to grab a clean fastener again. I'm going to go on the other side and what I'll notice is that right away it's, it's taking a lot of effort to get through there, which tells me that there's thread locker corrosion or something in there. Right. But I'm going to go ahead and see what I could do. I can force this got a little spot that just broke through. Okay. Okay. And that's about all I'm, all I'm getting out of it. So let's see what that looks like. Uh, when I measure it, since it's a Harley, I'll just use SAE. So if I go here, zero that I've got 380,000, something like that. Let me do it again. Three, three 69 or so. And then on this fork, look at that. I'm 480 something. I mean, it's significantly prouder standing off because I have that buildup and that gunk down in there. Let's talk about what the risks are. So if I, if I say, ah, I'll just crank down that, it'll be good enough. If you measure the thickness of the fender, the washer, and you say, well, 480 is still good enough. Okay. The problem is I'm not grabbing as many threads on this little casting that they designed for. Okay. So if they want us to grab two, three more threads down in here, that's what we want to do. Let's use all the threads we can in this to secure the part. Um, so that's, that's, that's one of the problems. This, the second problem is if you bottom out on gunk and thread locker down here, what's going to happen is your torque wrench will still click. So you're going to get what's called a false torque. And this is where a lot of people, let me kind of zoom out of here when they get done and the whole fenders on there, are they really grabbing it and checking it and make sure it doesn't move around. If I have a false torque on here, that means I didn't really pinch, you know, that bracket that's holding it to the fork. And then what's going to happen is eventually just everything's going to come loose because there's no clamping force. There's no clamping load on that. So what we can do, what we could do to fix this. Let me get this back out. There's definitely some old gunk in here. All right, let me show you how to fix it. Now a bunch of different ways you can skin this gap. Okay. So, uh, I love putting lube on these if I'm going to, uh, use a lock washer or I'm going to use anti-seize or something, it's nice to lubricate this up. Um, or I could just use to clean it when I'm done or so on. I'm going to give it a feel and see if I feel like I need to it. So that's one caution when using, uh, chases or taps or anything, you have to decide whether you want to lube it. I'm going to see what happens if I just go in here dry. Okay. Actually, first off from doing some other bolts, clean that out a little bit. You notice how I kind of wiggle, wiggled it because I don't want to cross thread it. Okay. All right. So we got it started. Let's feel it just starting to cut. Okay. I can tell here from doing the other ones, not all the way down. So let's see if I can bust through and you, you might get lucky where the debris goes up into the flute or that flat space, you know, from top to bottom on the tap or on the thread chaser and just pushes all the junk in there. But I definitely don't want to break this off in here. That'd be a really bad day. Okay. I'm feeling a pretty hard stop. I'm back up. Give it a little wiggle, wiggle. Okay. I got one last little like chunk out of that. Oh yeah. Look at this now. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You could see the crap that fills up inside that channel there. That's what, that's where the debris goes. That's the intended design of this. Pretty cool. And they've been around forever. So whoever thought of that better be rich. Okay. Now look at that. Look at that. Okay. Let's just see what we're at here. Three nine. Oh, I rezero this. I'm actually a three 60 on this one. Let me double check this three 61. There we go. So pretty cool. Anyway, this is a way that you can do it yourself, verify it and make sure that your parts aren't going to fall off. There you go. My friend thread chasers. I'll put a link to our Amazon cart where you could get some of these as well. And other tools that we use here, how to wrench, but I need to get this back together. So hopefully this was a good reminder for you. If you're installing fasteners, how to get them on correctly. Use your manuals, use your torque specs, use the thread lockers and new brackets and everything. When they say to do something, if you're using like a staked over one just do it the right way and things will make it a very enjoyable ride. All right, my friends make sure to subscribe, like share all that good stuff, make it a great day. And as always keep wrenching.