In lawn mowers, the bolts are usually grooved in two places so they will fail when needed, this is common with other shear bolts as well, also sometimes drive shafts, marine use and so on.
Lippert specifies two grades for our slides and landing gear, a grade 5 and a grade 8. If you look, the landing gear has two socket head cap screws, one 1” and one 1-¼” long with a Teflon insert in the nut so it won’t back out. This is supposed to be grade 5.
The only problem with that, is black socket head cap screws with 180,000 medium tinsel carbon alloy strength are approximately grade 8. (For ½” and smaller) Stainless are around grade 2. I talked to 6 bolt suppliers, they all were the same.
I talked to the Lippert shop foreman, he looked up the length and grades specified for landing gear and slides.
How we end up with grade 8 instead of the specified grade 5 in the landing gear is anyone’s guess.
There is no reason hex-head bolts will not work in the landing gear, the head clearance is actually less than the cap screw for clearance at the motor end, the other end doesn’t matter.
I am sending out a set of the correct spare shear bolts with orders from my catalog. I added a section for MOC members on my web-site, with the items you all suggested we often need.
Correct me if I got something wrong here, I do make mistakes...
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