Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill
Sailor -
I'm certainly not going to disagree. As I say, I'm not an ME. Welding a nut or a pipe, to relieve any point stresses at the microscopic scale, and thereby stop cracks, sounds like a good idea.
I have no idea whether the holes in the frame members of my TMs are drilled or stamped. And I don't even know how to tell.
I'm not sure I buy the "flex a piece of metal until it breaks" argument, though, since the flexing is in a different direction. In your argument, the flexing is back and forth across the plane of the hole (like breaking a cracker). In the I-beam case, it is parallel to the plane of the hole, which is much harder to do.
Where is Larry Loo when we need him?
Bill
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Bill,
I'm going with your intuition on this one. It's hard to imagine a point in the web of the front of a trailer frame where drilling a 3/8 hole is going to be a failure factor, considering that the point of maximum bending load is going to be over the axle (rated for 4000# plus on a trailmanor), and you have the same steel cross section dimensions all the way to the tongue (even PopBeavers can only come up with 1100# or so in tongue weight on a 5000# trailer) (but tell me about a crack ever caused by somebody drilling a hole anywhere on a trailer frame, and I'll cheerfully catalog the experience).
For anybody who'd like to do the math:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_(s...General_shapes