I pulled my rocker panels off this weekend and found the mounts are like everything else the previous bubba had worked on, screwed up.

I remember reading one time about a fix for the stripped holes, does anyone remember or have a fix they can suggest?

Thanks for any help.

 

I think I saw a referb kit in Zip's catalog that uses well nuts (like those used for pass side mirrors and luggage racks) for mounting. Good luck with it.

 

Thanks I will check it out. Just another thing that has to be fixed. :mad

 

I repaired mine 2 years ago. I also bought the repair kit (Eckler's or Corvette Central don't remember which). Once I was in there tho I only used part of the kit. I had to fab the front/rear (ends of rocker) mounts repair from Home Depot.

Personally if I had to do it over again I would fab the whole repair with parts from a hardware store for about 1/3 the price of the kit.

 

I just did my 75 last week. Bought a kit , be careful the brass barrel nuts are easy to twist off-then they are no good. You might have to enlarge some of the holes in the fiber glass, that was no problem. The whole project didn't take long at all. :cheers:

 

Went to Ace Hardware and bought stainless steel oval head machine screws, washers and nuts. Put a little Locktite on them and it went together fast. Less than $4 as I recall. No more rusted hardware for me. :D

Greg

 

:iagree: I did the same thing. I went with stainless hardware.

 

The fasteners used to hold the rocker panels on are called “Riv Nuts”. There is a special tool that screws into the threads of the Riv Nut and with the nut inserted into the correct sized hole in the body, you collapse the Riv Nut. Remove the tool and you now have a threaded insert that you can screw the correct machine screw into. Use a little anti-seize on the screw and they will never give you a problem.

Typically the original machine screw rusts to the original Riv Nut and either spins the Riv Nut without the screw coming out or if the Rive Nut was installed tightly, they will break the screw. I see many that have drilled into the rocker panel on the car and used regular screws in their place. These rarely hold well because the metal is too thin, which is why the factory used a Riv Nut to begin with.

I just cut off the old Riv Nut and install new ones. Ford used the same nuts to hold their mirrors on the thin door skin in many of their cars in the sixties and they work well. The tool is not expensive and you will find all sorts of uses for being able to install threaded inserts into thin panels once you have one. There are various size threaded inserts that you can use depending on what you want to secure and the thickness of the metal or panel you want to insert them into. The secret is to use anti-seize on the thread of the screw so they come out easily in the future.

GUSTO