Sometimes Engineering and Machine Shop Friends are Good to Have

So my coworker and I are both engineers, truck and car enthusiasts, etc. Except he's got a mill and lathe in his garage and I don't.

Branching off from my other thread where I'm looking for that black shock clevis Honda refuses to sell separately, I have had ZERO luck finding one and you can't use the one off a sabre/stateline either because it's a different shape.

So in 5 minutes I reverse engineered the bracket and modeled it up in CAD for him but we obviously have to design a little bit differently because we don't have access to that exact M12x1.5 stud. So here's the idea we came up with:



Obviously the smaller hole is for that anti rotation pin. That just punches out of the original clevis no problem. You can see the larger hole(s) one is a thru for the m12 stud and the larger counterbore is for the "head" of a stud. Now, he's just going to make a custom stud for me with a head that fits nicely in that counterbore. The stud will press fit into that thru hole (there will be an interference shoulder on the stud) so it won't rotate. But we're going to take it a step further to ensure that the stud stays where it needs to when torquing down.

Where the green circle is, and 180* from it on the other side, there will be a drill thru and tap (or the other option is just a drill thru all the way) for a threaded set screw. We'll drill so that the center of the small tapped hole sits right where the head of the stud meets the counterbore. This will essentially cause a "half circle" to be on each feature. Then we'll run a tap down through there (if we tap) and install a set screw in each location. Now the pressed in stud not only has the press fit but if for some reason that failed, it's locked into position.

If we don't (read: can't) tap that material, we'll just drill thru or blind depending on what we decide and press fit a pin in those locations. It will do the same thing for counter rotation.

The reason we might not be able to tap is this is some material scrap we got from work. It's 15-5 PH H1025 stainless steel. This stuff is very hard to machine, let alone tap with a small diameter tool. If you're wondering about material specs, it has an ultimate tensile strength of 206ksi (206,000 psi), which is about 3.5x the strength of mild steel which the OEM bracket is stamped/bent from. This thing is going to be STOUT.

In in finishing thoughts, Honda, get your S together. It's a bolt on part to a shock that should cost us $15 to buy. IIstead you're nice enough to "include" it with a new $700 shock.