Re con King pins

[Nourish]

They used to recut king pins for undersized trunions - not any more? - I've quite a few worn out ones!

[ManyMinors]

That process - common at one time - relied on the supply (from BMC) of suitable trunnions with the matching thread. Once those stopped being produced the re-cutting became pointless unfortunately.

[philthehill]

The undersize trunnions were painted red.
I have seen a couple of undersize trunnions on 'e' bay recently but they are useless if you do not have the undersize die.

[ManyMinors]

They were indeed daubed with red paint to distinguish them from the "standard" trunnions which possibly had white paint similarly applied (?). The garage I used to work at had both in stock and had the tools to recut the threads - as did the Post Office workshops and others who ran large fleets of Minor vans. Long time ago now!

[Nourish]

There were some dies on Fleabay a little while ago.
I don't understand why it's not viable for the likes of say ESM to offer this service?

[ManyMinors]

As I said earlier. The process relied on the supply of the correct trunnions. This does not exist any more. Much effort and investment would be required to remanufacture them I guess.
Whilst a company could offer the service of recutting the threads, the customer would have to strip their car down, strip the swivel pin down, clean it, wrap it up and send it (at some expense) to the company and then wait with their car in bits, until the threads could be re-cut and new trunnions supplied and then all posted back again. Would all that cost and inconvenience really be so much better than purchasing the new parts in the first place? How many customers would be required to make the whole process worthwhile? Do that many people require the service? From my own experience, if a Minor is well maintained, these parts give very little trouble. I have never required new swivel pins on my own cars - even when covering fairly high annual mileages, so I am doubtful that such an investment would be worthwhile despite it perhaps seeming a good idea.
Commercially, suppliers such as ESM will no doubt prefer to sell new swivel pins in order to make the investment in the manufacture of them worthwhile. No point in investing large sums in the remanufacture of an item and then offering a less expensive alternative is there?

[Nourish]

You make some good points but who ever makes the Trunnions could easily make some with undersize threads. It's seems such a waste just to throw these King pins out as so much goes in to making them - the forging is ok as is the spindle.
As for waiting - lots of things are sold as re cons - you pay a supplement that is returned when you send back your old worn out parts. As far as reconditioning them I would of thought the man hours required would be quite low

[philthehill]

If they were worth reconditioning reconditioned swivels would have been available for some considerable time.
Whilst it would be nice to recondition and re-use the swivels; donning my production planners and time & motion/methodology hats I am firmly of the opinion that the effort and cost of reconditioning a Minor swivel is not worth the effort - the cost of producing new tooling and introducing new processes is prohibitive against what would be a small production requirement..
The nearest we have got to latterly reconditioning swivels was the introduction of the Walford trunnion for the Marina. If it was cost effective I am sure that Walford would have introduced a Walford trunnion for the Minor.

Walford TrunnionsMarina.jpg (54.88 KiB) Viewed 885 times