Reply To: How to remove set screw without damaging threads?
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The technique @mma02720 describes for gripping threaded rods using two nuts is more difficult in this situation. You’re dealing with vintage Record/Stanley threads – known to be the most obscure, unconventional threads ever used. You could try TWO Record Adjuster-Nuts, lock them, wrap with leather to protect the knurling, then grip like crazy to unscrew.
ASSUMING it unscrews anyway! It may not unscrew at all. You could wreck it.
You’re thinking of, and applying, today’s manufacturing methods, to determine how this may have been made back in 1945. They cared in those days. Reputation and Branding were everything. Labour was cheap.
Don’t assume because it’d be an easy parallel threaded hole today, that it was back then.
Today, you’d unscrew the Adjuster and the rod would disengage from the body at the same time. This hasn’t budged in more than seventy years.
What if it has a square-section at the concealed end?
What if its otherwise secured within the plane body, to prevent rotation & slop?
The rod could be larger at the far end, tapered, pushed through from the inside before tapping?
Fixed between the two cast halves during manufacture?
Assuming you managed to source two obscure nuts or Adjusters; you hold the body in a vice/clamp, grip the nut with your spanner, then you feel it ‘give’ and start to undo under the torque you’re applying.
Great, you’ll get to clean it up like new on the inside. Then you realise, it wasn’t undoing, it was twisting and stretching the threaded rod like soft toffee, or stripping the threads altogether.
Perhaps the inside is seized solid, and the steel is softer than it first appears?
If you clean/polish everything you can see and reach now Geoff, I’m sure you’ll agree you’ve already dismantled it enough.