[DeTomaso] Engine cover

[Larry Finch]

Mike,

You are making this minuscule task much harder than it needs to be. 

No one called you nuts, but I did ask if your “simple metric nuts” opinion was based on any experience. It wasn’t. 

As the original poster and I had already discovered through our experience, the reality is that if you go to a hardware store and ask for a square metric nut the only option presented is smaller than what was used on our cars.

As I initially suggested at the beginning of this thread I replaced one of mine by simply constructing one out of a piece of steel bar stock.

M5-0.80

As for how large to make this nut, simply make it sized to fit the pocket it is going to reside in. Anyone care to bet money that all of the capture pockets were the same throughout the production run?  :-)

“Hey Guido!! We are running out of the engine cover nuts. What size are they? Do we have anymore of them? Never mind, find some bar stock and make some for me, we can change the capture pockets if we need to.”
 
I don’t know what your friend’s fabricating situation is, but this project doesn’t require a mill or a precision micrometer. Just about any man garage should be able to create these nuts :

Steel-drill-drill bit-tap-hacksaw-file-done

Or I suppose you could sketch a dimensional drawing and send it off to a web-based machine shop. 

;-)

Larry 

Sent from me using a magic, handheld electronic gizmo.