Deuce won’t wear boots

[sermis]

The inside of the boot on the drivers side keeps coming loose. The boot looks good and I have cleaned both the boot and axel but it keeps coming loose. How tight should the clamp be? I did not want to over tighten it however I don’t want to keep having to put it back on.

 

[devilman96]

Try not to roll your eyes when I say this but... Tight... but not to tight...

I've seen this subject come up a few times now... Do a search for it... Some have had problems with certian types of boots... Some have had problems with the nuts coming loose (use lock nuts or double nut /locktite it)...

 

[Floridianson]

Don't know but I brought the two ends together on mine. Too say it was tight would be a under statement.

 

[Recovry4x4]

Is the bolt at the top?

 

[Banshee365]

I like double lock nuts with loctite so I never have to retighten them.

-Kelly

 

[sermis]

Bolt was in front center. I have it at the top now. I have tried snug to tight and it still came off however I had the clamp in the front and not on top.

 

[houdel]

Here is the Voice of Experience talking. I went through the "replace the boot" exercise THREE times before I finally got it right!

The inner clamp bolt MUST be on the TOP of the knuckle, otherwise the knuckle will knock the clamp off when you turn. Unfortunately the illustration in the TM shows the inner clamp towards the front of the knuckle, but the fine print states to install the clamp at the top. Tighten as much as you are comfortable, and DO use a self locking nut! I used a Nylock nut.

My clamp came with a metric nut and bolt, so I had to replace them with US (SAE) hardware in order to use a locking nut. The metric diameters and lengths fall halfway between the SAE sizes, always pick the next larger SAE diameter and next longer SAE length. There is plenty of room in there so a larger bolt is not a problem. DO NOT use a shorter bolt than what came with your clamp, you will have a devil of a time compressing the clamp enough to get the nut started with a shorter bolt!

Two final tips:

1. The TM says to bend the end of the bolt up (presumably to keep the nut from loosening). DO NOT DO IT! Use a locking nut so you can disassemble the clamp later if you need to, say to service the knuckle.

2. The TM also says to cut the end of the zipper off after you have the outer clamp in place. DO NOT DO THIS EITHER! Same reasoning, the excess zipper is not in the way of any moving parts and does no harm being there. But if you ever need to take the boot off, again say to service the knuckle, it will unzip from the cut end and you will not be able to put it together again, but instead will have to buy another new boot!

 

[cranetruck]

2. The TM also says to cut the end of the zipper off after you have the outer clamp in place. DO NOT DO THIS EITHER! Same reasoning, the excess zipper is not in the way of any moving parts and does no harm being there. But if you ever need to take the boot off, again say to service the knuckle, it will unzip from the cut end and you will not be able to put it together again, but instead will have to buy another new boot!

To finish the procedure, you need to seal the zipper to make it waterproof and it probably can't be taken apart and reused anyway.

As a side note, the boots on my 8x8 still have the zippers intact and they were not sealed, so I may be able to take them off and service them. Have no idea where to get new ones....

 

[houdel]

Thanks Bjorn, I forgot the part about sealing the zipper with silicone sealant. But my intent was not to unzip the boot later, just to be able to remove the clamps and move the boot out of the way if you had to do some work on the knuckle, kingpins, etc. With the zipper uncut and sealed with silicone, the boot essentially becomes one of those "one piece" boots which a few SS members seen to rave about.

And BTW, the silicone does NOT prevent the zipper from unzipping. The first boot I did I sealed with silicone, cut the zipper end off, had the clamp bolt in the wrong place so it promptly popped off again. While trying to get the inner clamp back in place the zipper pulled apart in spite of the silicone seal, so I had to buy another boot. Installed the second boot still with the inner clamp in the wrong place, but I didn't cut off the zipper end so when that one popped off I was able to reuse the boot, this time with the inner clamp at the top of the knuckle. Haven't had a problem since.

 

[cranetruck]

Silicone is tricky to use, the surface should really be primed for the sealant to stick. When we encapsulated electronics with silicone, we had to use a primer for it to stick.
The best silicone based sealer I have found around town is the Marine "Goop", it will stick, must have some built-in primer of sorts.

 

[houdel]

Haven't tried the marine "Goop", but I have used the shoe "Goop" for fixing tennis/running shoes. It sticks to most anything and wears like iron. Maybe I'll switch to that stuff in place of silicone, its a lot cheaper and seems to work better.