I was thinking you’re correct. One half of the band has old rust. The other half was pretty clean. The bit of rust on the clean break got on after it broke, I believe. I really wonder if it broke on original installation.
I might be the Lone Ranger, but I’ve always liked these clamps, never had a problems with them. However the “steel” in this clamp looks like “white metal,” not quality steel.
Whenever I buy worm-screw style clamps I insist that they’re the ones that say, “All S.S” (all stainless steel). I’m down to just one place in my little town that carries them. I used a magnet on that baby right in the hardware store to verify it was all stainless (including the worm).
In hard to reach places like this one it’s nice if they can still unscrew after several years. And that baby isn’t going to rust off in the next 181,000 miles!
I’ve had lots of old cars, done lots of repairs, including radiators and hoses, etcetera. I’ve never had a leak caused by a failed clamp alone!
I hesitated replacing just the clamp and not the hose and/or radiator. I had all the coolant siphoned out into jugs and had the shroud most of the way off. Other than that one hose, radiator replacement is pretty much a cake walk on this land yacht. Next week will probably be the hose or radiator.
I’d bet that some/many/most shops would have diagnosed this as a radiator leak (like I did at first) and sold me that on my estimate. And I’d bet it would have cost me north of $300 instead of $2. CSA
I’m not too sold on the idea of bad metal. I currently own 2 Fords and have owned 3 or 4 others in the past with similar clamps. There has never been an issue ever with the clamps.
A Ford dealer used to send me some used car work and I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a failed clamp on any of those cars either.
Some years ago I came up on a very elderly gentleman whose Lincoln had quit him suddenly and in a bad spot. In the right hand lane of a road where it merged with traffic.
I pulled around the corner and came back to help him. The problem was that the positive battery cable end was made in the same manner as these clamps.
One half of the band broke (the lower band) and that allowed the cable end to come loose; causing the engine to shut down.
So, you think it was just rust?
I’m not in OK. Where I live we basically have 2 seasons, Summer (3 months of nice weather) and Salt (about 7 months of rust). There’s about 2 months of what some describe as Autumn and Spring (2 other seasons?), but I’m not convinced.
It is dangerous driving in the winter. I’ve actually lost traction on salt! The roads are paved with wet rock salt for much of the year. They literally turn white. Cars turn to junk. CSA
Because of the salt where i live I have learned to never reinstall a spring clamp, I always replace it with a worm drive. With old spring clamps the ears you squeeze crumble, making it hard to get the clamp off without damaging something.
For the life of me, I don’t know how mechanics in rhe Rust Belt keep their sanity having to deal with that problem all the time.
Now and then we’ve gotten a northern rust bucket down here in OK for repairs. Sometimes the quote price goes way up and sometimes we’ve just told them it’s beyond hope and we’re not interested.
I mentioned the story before, but we had a Subaru in once for repairs. I got the attention of a fellow mechanic down the shop a ways and asked him what he thought about my soda can sitting on top of the front tire. He shrugged, so what.
I reached through the top of the fender and retrieved the can…
Both sides were like that. I’m surprised the floor hadn’t given way and dropped the seats onto the pavement.
Sadly, the car was only about 5 years old and was from MN.
Once I squeezed this clamp to slide it back and discovered it was broken I had a little difficulty removing it. As I said earlier, accessing this clamp isn’t easy (see third picture) and if you look (see second picture) you’ll notice it didn’t break in equal halves.
One part of the clamp fell off. It was shaped like this: ) .
The other part still had a good hold on the hose. It was shaped like this: C .
I agree with you. Ordinarily, using stainless worm-screw clamps is a good idea, but in this case I could have more easily accessed a spring-style clamp. CSA
I would guess that rust started eating its way through the clamp microscopically. This would never have been seen with the naked eye.
Much like the Comet airliners in the 50s. Several crashes leading to the deaths of all aboard and no one knew why. It was eventually traced to the square window design. These were changed to oval design windows and that solved the problem.
An electron microscope was used to detect tiny cracks that began at the square corners of the windows. During flight that microscopic crack would split wide open and the fuselage would disentegrate.
I’m inclined to agree. Even a nick can manifest itself as a “stress concentration area” where material can begin to fracture. Nobody anymore designs inside square corners where stress will exist. I once many years ago stopped stress fracturing on alumina microwave substrates with laser cut reliefs for the surface mounted components by simply adding radii to the inside corners. The laser was creating microfractures that were opening up in the surface mounting process. And, in the case of the clamps, a stress-concentration area will be more prone to granular corrosion and catastrophic failure.
