i need to saw of some of the nitro sleeve that would not go in for the world. tried a grinder and found that was a bad idea. what has everyone else used?

 

I think you are the first one I heard of needing to do this. I have some Nitro sleeves sitting in my office, so I'm curious as to what went wrong.

 

Some people just bang on the sleeve end, mushrooming it. I believe you cut it with a grinder and a cut off wheel, with something shoved in the sleeve to prevent shavings from entering.

 

I just want to say that I wish I had seen this post this morning and it would have made me feel a lot better.

First off, not to bash Nitro or anything like that, I think they make a great product and I'm very happy with the end result. However, the picture shown on the internet of the sleeves is deceiving and the ones we received were not machined to the same quality as shown in the picture. There were obvious tooling marks on the sleeve, and we even measured with calipers and found that the sleeve diameter was not consistent.

That being said, we froze the sleeves, slathered them in antisieze and 3 people hammered on them for 2 days. The driver's side went in without any problem. The passenger side hung up with 30 mm remaining. After 4 hours of beating, we got to 22 mm. Despite heating the axle tube to help things along, we ended up breaking 3 different types of drivers. It hit a limit and would not go any further.

So. We cut. Used a Dremel with 3 metal cutoff disks to cut from the inside of the sleeve out. Was about 30 minutes of cutting, not including breaks for tool cool down. An angle grinder would not have worked without cutting into the C and would have left too much sleeve exposed. Minimal smoothing was required after the cutting was done.

Frankly I'm shocked that no one else has mentioned (or admitted) to having done this before. Good luck!

 

demtek

i think that the nitro sleeves have tight tolerances but the AXLE TUBES DONT. i would see if they slide in by hand, if so leave the knurls. if youre going to have bang them in because they are tight id flap disc off the top of the knurls.