jawa-enfield wrote:Anmd TPI, is BSC and CEI?
i will look..
Yes, the translation says the thingies for an allen key are hex bolts and a hex key is the same as an allan key but that doesn't work out.
It tapping a M8 thread possible?
No TPI is how many turns of thread there are for every inch. It is a measurement of the thread pitch.
5/16" is 7.94mm so too close to drill and over-tap an M8 without making a real mess of things. So then you'd be looking at M9, which is probably just as difficult if not more difficult to obtain. If I was going for a metric conversion, I'd use an M8 timesert type thread insert where you drill the hole oversize, tap it and screw a threaded insert into the hole to take it back down to the desired size.
BSC is "British Standard Cycle Thread" which is a system of thread sizes of particular size and pitch (in the same way as you have metric course and metric fine thread sizes or Whitworth or Unified threads). CEI stands for "Cycle Engineers Institute." thread system, which is measured differently but again is a type of sizing standardisation.
Historically before there was BSC, there was chaos, each manufacturer just made their own threads and it was the case that each nut and bolt had to be kept for the particular hole it was going in on the particular machine it was fitted to. If you lost one, you'd have to make a replacement.
As I say, I have always known the type of fitting that takes an allen key as a "socket head" or "allen-head".
The "Hex" referrs to a six-sided hexagonal shape. I would usually referr to a standard hexagonal bolt head as a hex-head Another term for an allen key is a hex-key but that is referring to the tool that undoes the fitting, not the fitting itself.
Isn't English fun? Don't let the French tell you it's all about metric either. Even they use 9/16" x 20tpi threads on their bicycle pedals which is a very odd thread size first used for this by the Wright brothers (yes, those ones).