I was roughing up my front discs (almost too close to actually get turned, new discs in the near future), because they were squeeking.

When I put in the lower caliper bolt on the pass. side, it stripped out. I think it was already close when I got the axle, because I usually don't torque too much on my bolts.

Would it be safe to heli-coil this hole?

The problem is that it's been converted to high steer, and to get another one made would just be a lot more work than a helicoil. It has a pitman arm that's been welded to the spindle with a great big gusset in between. I've already read the post on this conversion and the contraversey on it, but I'm wanting to stick with it for now.
p.s. this is a wrangler Dana 30 front axle.

A heli-coil should work fine. It will probably be stronger with it than stock.

Why not just replace the caliper? They're cheap.

I used a helicoil for one of my rear disc calipers on my 8.8. No problems.

Helicoil will work.

I did the same thing on my D30 back when I had one ;-)
Hellicoil gave me no troubles.

Phil

Originally posted by Jakesteramalamajama
Why not just replace the caliper? They're cheap.


Hell yeah ... you can get a new caliper, exchanged for $20 Dollars. That is a much better deal, than the headache of adding a heli-coil.

You can get oversized bolts that tap themselves into the stripped hole.

I guess several of you aren't familiar with the setup. The caliper isn't actually bolted to the "spindle, knuckle" whatever it is. There are two bolts that bolt onto the spindle. Around these bolts are sleeves that the caliper slides back and forth on. I'm guessing this is considered "floating calipers" whereas fixed calipers use the piston to differentiate the space between the pad and rotor. I'm not totally sure about this but it sure sounds good.

So anyhow I guess I could've used a larger bolt if I could've found the right size for the caliper to slide on.

Instead I used a helicoil in conjuction with some loctite between the helicoil and the new larger threads. So far so good, oh and I don't know if I got jipped, but the grand total was about $40 for a tube of coils, the inserter, tap and bit. Kinda steep, but it was a safety issue, so cost wasn't much of an option.

Thanks for your input