Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Morgan Three Wheeler & Super 3 Oil Sumping / Air cleaner sucking - hack?

Yes, the temptation is always to lean on the sump plug due to fear of the consequences of it coming undone. However, it's equally important not to do it up TOO TIGHT as I found out to my cost recently when I discovered that my sump plug threads had stripped. 1/2in Helicoil kit on order! Interestingly I cannot find any recommended torque setting for the X-Wedge drain plug in the S&S documentation. Harley seem to specify 14-21 ft-lb and I'll certainly be using a torque wrench in future. I'm normally pretty careful with this kind of thing so I reckon that if it can happen to me it can happen to anyone!

I recommend drilling and lock wiring the plug

If you are going to fit a drain plug that can be wire locked you will need a 1/2" UNF (20 tpi) with a hex head that can be drilled for locking. Alternatively you can use some Torque Seal varnish with the standard flush fitting plug, look it up on eBay, very useful for checking that nuts and plugs etc. have not moved and helps stop them moving. Just nip the drain plug up, it has an O ring on it and doesn't require a lot of torque to seal.

Harley's spec for the sump plug would have no bearing on the spec for the S&S X-wedge, which was not made by Harley.

Tightening fixings by feel seems to be a lost art. Typically gained early in life after a few stripped threads!

TBH working to actual torque figures rarely works in my case as they usually refer to dry fitting. More often than not I've put a blob of grease or copper slip on fitting, particularly if exposed to road dirt to ensure it can easily be removed later. Use of nylock nuts or even spring washers under plain gives confidence. Keeping in mind the material you are working with plus it's thickness in the case of tapped holes, even thread pitch helps as well.

Thinking hard, I can't recall anything coming loose. This is not to say there aren't occasions I do use a torque wrench though, on internal engine parts or safety critical components for example.

Seems I too learned a reasonable amount of force to apply to a spanner in my yoof.

Starting off with bicycle nuts and bolts was not good training as it seems back then the materials used were much stronger than steel into alloy as were the fixings on my m/cycles.

As Richard stated, a few stripped threads and you soon learned that spanners were usually sized relative to the approximate average force requiring to be applied to the fixing, but as ever the materials involved had to be taken into account....

Never had a torque wrench in my early tool kit, and fixings seemed to do their task without regular attention. Even today while I do have a couple of torque wrenches I have not ever found the need to use them on on my old Morgan, and yes fixings do come loose on it from time to time...

Perhaps that my old Trad`s design and construction may be along similar lines to that of a Shackleton, which was described by an engineer as being so many thousand rivets flying in loose formation, such is the flex in my Morgan that if on a rare occasion I might be inclined to give it a bit of stick over other than the smoothest of roads, after so doing it seems reasonable to run over it with a spanner when one is underneath with the grease gun...?

Perhaps more modern Morgans of all types are far more sophisticated beasts requiring more use of a torque wrench in all sorts of areas...?

I started on an Austin 3 litre truck engine George at the age of 15, fitting new piston rings. I then graduated onto push bikes when I failed my driving test

Richard, no cars in my family as a kid, though I had an uncle who raced a Gold Star... unfortunately he was always too busy to spend time with a kid of my age..

While my pals would ever be off playing I used to hover about in the street outside my tenement whenever a neighbour worked on an old pre-war Rover, with yellow tinted windows... The term classic car had not yet been invented.. (-: I well remember hardwood being drilled and bolted in to reinforce chassis corrosion, and so much more being carried out at the roadside.... I used to repair my m/cycles at the same location, I was about to have a go at working on my first car in that location too, a equally rotten old AH Frogeye kept under a tarpaulin to hide the fact it could not be driven and had neither tax or MOT, till a kindly big police Sargent gave me a week to get that scrap off the road... Yeah we live and learn, trouble is these days I have forgotten more than I learned... Duh !

Hard to imagine you failing at anything Richard... I failed my test twice due to nerves...before my mum slipped me a micky pre test No3.. which did the trick...

Sorry for the thread drift guys..