castanagajt
Contributor
These can be very laborious all I have to say is wow. Most of the time one can take off the straps as easy as shown on the Forcefin2020 on youtube.com just not this time.
I was an idiot to have my cousin whom was trying my fins on his pool last Saturday and I had the straps on backwards. Basically, the strap you lash them on was on the inside of the divers' leg. In order to fix this, I tried to cut the head of the bolt with my saw and it barely did a scratch on them. Next up, my bench grinder with the coarse side of the stone. I was able to almost take off the whole head but the strap melted and the polyurethane was at its beginning of melting.
Polyurethane was pretty resilient to heat, I am impressed.
Enough of that so the strap came off on the side I was working on so I pulled small hacksaw once more and started on the shaft of the bolt this time. This thing was tough it took about an hour on a relaxed pace to cut the bolt right off so I can replace the parts and it was a good thing I had a spare parts fin strap kit laying around.
To my amazement the parts has been improved. The brass grommet which goes behind the foot pocket is much wider than the old one, probably to keep it from spinning around when disassembling it. The bolts still shares the same size head but the shaft is at least 4 threads longer than the old ones.
I ended up using the new brass grommets, the old style bolts to aid me from gorilla tightening the bolts this time and having the loctite dry up on the threads of the bolts before assembling the strap altogether. That probably has kept the bolt from letting go on the brass grommet the first time.
As for the strap with the ruined hole I am sure I can go to my neighborhood hardware store and purchase 2 big washers and re-use them once more. They may rust but it sure is nice to know the straps can still be salvageable.
I was an idiot to have my cousin whom was trying my fins on his pool last Saturday and I had the straps on backwards. Basically, the strap you lash them on was on the inside of the divers' leg. In order to fix this, I tried to cut the head of the bolt with my saw and it barely did a scratch on them. Next up, my bench grinder with the coarse side of the stone. I was able to almost take off the whole head but the strap melted and the polyurethane was at its beginning of melting.
Polyurethane was pretty resilient to heat, I am impressed.
Enough of that so the strap came off on the side I was working on so I pulled small hacksaw once more and started on the shaft of the bolt this time. This thing was tough it took about an hour on a relaxed pace to cut the bolt right off so I can replace the parts and it was a good thing I had a spare parts fin strap kit laying around.
To my amazement the parts has been improved. The brass grommet which goes behind the foot pocket is much wider than the old one, probably to keep it from spinning around when disassembling it. The bolts still shares the same size head but the shaft is at least 4 threads longer than the old ones.
I ended up using the new brass grommets, the old style bolts to aid me from gorilla tightening the bolts this time and having the loctite dry up on the threads of the bolts before assembling the strap altogether. That probably has kept the bolt from letting go on the brass grommet the first time.
As for the strap with the ruined hole I am sure I can go to my neighborhood hardware store and purchase 2 big washers and re-use them once more. They may rust but it sure is nice to know the straps can still be salvageable.
