From Fastener Technology International, December 2013
I have an older garden tractor that I use to cut my grass. Several years ago the engine began to puff smoke and quickly deteriorated to where it was evident that I either needed a new tractor or to rebuild the engine. Since a new, comparable tractor was not in my budget, I decided to rebuild the engine on my own. This meant removing the hood and cowlings to gain access to the engine so that I could take it off the frame and rebuild it. On this tractor, each side of the engine compartment is shrouded by a separate metal panel with two clearance holes in the top corners, which allow a screw to pass through and clamp the panel in place with a metal J-type clip located at a connection point behind the panel. Although this type of joint had worked fine for almost 30 years, after removing these screws and reconnecting them a couple of times, the much harder spring steel clip “stripped” the threads off of the softer screws and they began to back-out. Of course this created a problem when the tractor was running because there was no clamp load left and the panels would vibrate loudly.
Initially, my solution was to retighten the screws, later I began rotating them between joints, and finally I replaced the old screws with new ones. None of these solutions worked for long and I finally got fed up with it and decided to fix it for good.