NUTS, BOLTS, SCREWS & SPANNERS

These small items are essential for many tasks in your motorhome, so it's important to understand the various types and their uses, says Sam Coles

- Sam Coles

Put simply, we all rely on nuts, bolts and screws to hold our world together. Without them, our lives really would fall apart. But despite the fact that we will encounter them in our everyday activities, too few of us have a clear understanding of their properties and complexities, and how to use them.

Select the right fixings

All too often, when you need them for a DIY task in your motorhome, the general approach seems to be just to dig around in the ‘odds and ends’ tin in your toolkit until you find something that looks suitable. Then it’s a case of ‘if it fits, use it’ – which can actually be quite dangerous.

A prime example of this concerns your vehicle’s wheels, which are held in position with bolts or wheel nuts.

Both will usually have a standard metric thread, which means that technically any bolt and nut with a corresponding thread would fit.

However, wheel studs and nuts are normally made from high-tensile steel, so they are very strong and well able to cope with the high stress levels that are involved. If you were to replace them with a mild-steel variant. that would most likely result in them shearing under load – and this could then result in potentially catastrophic consequences.

So the key point here is to know what you are dealing with and then to provision accordingly when you are replacing any screw fixings.

At the design stage of any leisure vehicle, the engineers will take into account the loading and environments that a bolt, screw or nut will have to put up with during its lifetime, and specify its properties accordingly.