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Beta 35 Alternator Bracket


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My Beta 35 has just clocked up 3,000 hours, sadly way too many of them from battery charging and one alternator bracket mounting bolt has just failed. This looks to me like a classic fatigue failure in shear. There is significant fretting corrosion around the area of the two mounting bolts - you can see the red dust on the picture, it's just as bad around the bolt hidden under the alternator wiring loom which hasn't failed yet. It appears to me that the twisting moment on the bracket caused by the tension of the alternator belt is not being fully counteracted by the clamping force of the two M8 bolts. It isn't a surprise to me that the rear bolt has failed, the front one acting more of a pivot. M8 is way too small for this application in my mind and it doesn't help that Beta have used cheesy 8.8 grade... The large bolt holding the lifting bracket only attaches it to the alternator bracket, not to the cylinder head, so that's providing no assistance at all.

My plan is to extract the broken portion with an Easy Out and replace both bolts with 12.9 grade socket head cap screws. Before I go ahead and do that, does anyone have any other solutions/ upgrades that I should know about?

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If the bolts are kept tight they are perfectly adequate for the job. Problems arise when lazy people don't bother to do them up fully after adjustment. You may have had different experiences but I would sooner eat my own eyes than get caught by the great easyout joke again. 35 years as a working technician and I have seen 100 times more parts thrown away due to easyouts broken off in holes than bolts removed with the damned things.

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If the bolts are kept tight they are perfectly adequate for the job. Problems arise when lazy people don't bother to do them up fully after adjustment.

These aren't the alternator adjustment bolts - these bolts only attach the alternator mounting bracket to the cylinder head and as such, should have been correctly torqued up at the factory.

I take your point about Easy-Outs. Plan B was to drill out the bolt and run an M8 plug tap down the thread. It may have just become Plan A...

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I take your point about Easy-Outs. Plan B was to drill out the bolt and run an M8 plug tap down the thread. It may have just become Plan A...

I think that's a better way to go, worst that can happen is five minutes popping a helicoil in, with an easyout I bet you would have ended up taking the head off to get the wretched thing spark eroded.

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