Bernie The Bolt

[zoidberg]

A good engineer friend once suggested to me that 'designers' sometimes seem to like a bit of fun.....

There were certainly a couple of 'Bernies' on the old BMC 1800 in a mate's Rival34; the marinised-agricultural Kubota I recently extracted certainly had one.... and I think I've found its young cousin in the Beta fitted in its place.

Different size? Inaccessible behind other equipment? Metric parallel forced into BSP tapered? Suspect left-hand thread?

Have you discovered 'Bernies' fitted in your pet diesel?

 

[Blueboatman]

There was that story that Briggs and Stratton were the two waiters who collected all the paper napkin doodles from a Society of Motor Engineer dinner where they had played the ‘ let’s make it look like an engine but incorporate every bad idea that we know in it’ game.
I’m not sure it is at all true ?
( based on owning a few old 'uns but good 'uns)

 

[pandos]

cover plate on front of MD21b has bolts threaded in from the front, except one allen headed bolt threaded in from the rear just under the injection pump.

Peugeot 3008 battery tray has about 5 bolts threaded into the body from the engine bay side, and one rotten threaded in from the wheel arch...

I think they all they all do it....

worse is when you can take a component off the engine but cannot actually get out without taking the car apart, Volvo specialise in this approach but are champions at the hidden bolt trick also...

 

[zoidberg]

Those lovely lads at Beta Marine made me a set of Special Engine Feet to mount my #14 to the old moulded-in bearers. They provided a perfect fit.
However....
....the manual fuel pump lever needed to prime the pump could be touched ( just ) but not operated. The Special Engine Foot was right in the way.
Sure, there is a workaround or two. Nevertheless....

 

[Buck Turgidson]

I have to remove the water pump to get at the impeller. They are all Bernies on my engine.

 

[Tzu]

while I'm here - I rarely invest in an OEM oil filter. But when I do I'd like it to say 'Volvo' at the top when I've spun it on rather than at the bottom

 

[vyv_cox]

The French seem to take delight in using sizes different from everybody else, for which many kits do not contain spanners. My Citroen‐engined Lomax has 11 mm nuts on 7 mm studs, 12 and 14 mm bolts in various places. I bought some 10mm DZP bolts at the local Brico for a small job - the heads are 16 mm.

 

[AntarcticPilot]

Many years ago, when Dad had a caravan in the 1960s, we stopped at a place near Carnforth because of a fault on the caravan; I forget what it was. But we spent a night at a place where a guy collected old Rolls-Royces. He did this for several reasons, but the main one was that they were cheap! And they were cheap for several reasons. The first was that someone who wanted a Rolls-Royce in those days wanted a new one - there wasn't much second-hand market for them, especially given the running costs (even in those days, fuel economy of 10-15 mpg was regarded as low!). But the other reason was that they were extremely difficult to work on. The way he put it was that Rolls-Royce didn't care if a nut could only be tightened a sixth of a turn at a time - if that was what the engineering needed, they just put an apprentice onto tightening the bolt! These were, of course, mainly pre-war Rolls-Royces, built in the days when Rolls-Royce didn't admit that a Rolls COULD go wrong!

Maybe marine diesels are built with the same philosophy?

 

[Moodysailor]

AN engine manufacturer that shall remain nameless make a raw water pump that is - at first look - perfectly accessible. That is until you realise that whilst it is easy enough to unbolt it, in order to remove said pump from the engine means removing the front foot & engine mount.

So a simple raw water pump overhaul then turns into a major job to support the engine and re-align. ?‍

 

[lustyd]

The problem is that engineers always strive for the best engineering solution. It's quite hard to convince them to purposefully make a thing worse to offer less tangible value such as fewer spanners required. It also takes a brave person to argue with them on where the line is for the thing to be so bad as to be a poor product. We could easily make an engine that only needed a 10mm spanner to work on, but it would probably break more often!

 

[prv]

In my experience the engineers would like to make the thing as easy and accessible to work on as possible, and then the project manager says there's no time and the accountant says there's no budget.

Pete

 

[tjbrace]

I have to remove the water pump to get at the impeller. They are all Bernies on my engine.

Me too. Yanmar 3GM30F?

 

[Stemar]

I have twin Beta 20s on my Catalac. I've yet to figure out how to get the dipstick out of its hole, well hidden under the gas locker...

 

[zoidberg]

I suspect that, as OP, I've touched a raw nerve....

 

[AntarcticPilot]

View attachment 126209while I'm here - I rarely invest in an OEM oil filter. But when I do I'd like it to say 'Volvo' at the top when I've spun it on rather than at the bottom

Removing the starter motor on a Volvo 200x engine is difficult because the lower Allen bolt has insufficient space behind it to get a normal Allen key in. It requires a ball-headed Allen Key, or a very short one.

 

[Buck Turgidson]

Me too. Yanmar 3GM30F?

Mines a QM15. 70's vintage when labour was cheap I guess.

 

[Wing Mark]

Removing the starter motor on a Volvo 200x engine is difficult because the lower Allen bolt has insufficient space behind it to get a normal Allen key in. It requires a ball-headed Allen Key, or a very short one.

I have quite a collection of allen keys cut down and ground away!
Ball ended allens cut off and araldited into 1/4 drive sockets also!

 

[Mistroma]

My Yanmar 4HJ4AE has a bolt fixing the alternator tensioning arm. Easy to adjust the belt tension by loosening the lower alternator mounting bolts and the bolt on the slotted section of the tensioning arm. Then you just tighten the lower bolts and the one on the arm and the job is complete.

Well, not exactly. The tensioning arm will need to move ever so slightly and the bolt at the other end needs to be loosened and then tightened again during the process. No problem, just a single bolt. Yanmar used a long bolt that passes through a waterway before reaching the threaded hole in the block. I get a constant slow drip of coolant every time I adjust the belt tension.

It was perfect when the engine was brand new and paint formed a good seal. I had to make up an expanding rubber plug and thin sealing washer to stop the drip. I've always been convinced that Yanmar left something out, small flexible washer or other sealing device. However, the parts manual doesn't show anything and dealers can't identify anything fitted there.

I refit the belt every year, replace the rubber plug and thin washer before tightening and spraying over with some paint. Sometimes it leaks a couple of weeks later and requires some further work. Really bad design, putting a long external bolt through waterway in order to fix a moveable metal arm.

 

[Boater Sam]

Engine cooling water pump on Massey-Ferguson tractors that are inside the timing case and gear driven off the timing gears. OK till it leaks then the antifreeze goes into the sump and destroys the oil, wrecking the engine, Half the tractor has to come off to change a pump and the timing reset. Daft engineering

 

[John the kiwi]

Ford Australia put the transmission cooler inside the radiator on some cars. As you know the radiator is pressurised, but the transmission is not - at least until you get an internal leak in which case you have a failed transmission and an overheated engine all at the same time.