First thing to break on my MX60

In this post I explore a small issue which if not noticed by the rider (meaning being so bloody stupid to ignore it) will lead to greater problems. 

So I have the MX60 for a little while and I'd say my usage of it has been "patchy". This is quite simply because as a "grab and go" scooter I prefer the WideWheel and the MX60 tends to be what I reach for if its wet (mudguards are fantastic) or I want to go for a longer ride across bumpy or dirt roads (such as here),

Part 1 - the hinge screws

The stem hinge on the MX60 is an excellent piece of work which is held strongly by a central bolt and two small screws at its pivot hinge. One of these screws failed. The one on the left:

You can see in the picture that the screw on the right shows the remains of a goodly amount of red thread locker. Naturally I took care in removal of the good screw (with my proper fitting socket driven hex keys) to not round out the end (and give myself more grief).

I had to pull the remaining parts of the screw (still down in the threads) using tool called an Easy Out

which involves drilling down the core of the stuck thread. In doing this you need to make sure that you drill in the center of the remaining part of the screw and not to go off at an angle and destroy the thread that the screw screws into.

I strongly advise using a smaller diameter drill to start it, and a center punch to accurately place a small "starting mark" for the drill to begin the hole. The tool I bought didn't come with the drill (but I already had one.

You can see here that I got a pretty tidy hole in there and plenty of space for the easy out to bite into. You can also soo some rough burrs of metal around the mouth of (and inside) the hole, which is caused by the easy out biting in and gripping and turning the remains of the screw to work it out.

I did a brief video to show the results and provide a quick discussion on this

I replaced the screws with a higher tensile strength material, but as its not snapping from "tension" but being cut by essentially shear I'm not sure that's a good idea ... perhaps softer would be better.

I may take to replacing these every 6 months from now on because I bought 10 of  these for $2.50

Part 2 - the washer on the securing bolt

rather than create another blog post for this I thought I'd add in a part 2 and a video explaining what I did.

It seems that the bolt and nut on the front of the stem securing system also has something subtle which I did not notice before that may be what led to the the shearing of the hinge screw.

Happy Scooting