I must be going nuts.....

Unfortunately delivery of the AK chassis / body has coincided with my wife's implementation of a post-Christmas revised domestic fiscal strategy (i.e my spending has been capped....).  

In the meantime I decided to sort out the various nuts and bolts that AK supply with the new kit and try and work out what else I might need to buy (once funds are released!).

AK supply two packages of nuts and bolts.  One is identified as 'Body Bolts" and the other as "Generation II - Nut / Bolt Kit".  They also include in the documentation that comes with the kit, two lists detailing the contents of these two packs.

So all I needed to do was check the contents of the bags matched the lists - simple.  Well, not as simple as it sounds.

Firstly the nuts and bolts just come in a variety of bags with no indication of sizes (and unfortunately my eye is not practiced enough to know a M8 from an M10 by sight alone and just to mix it up a bit some of the bolts are metric and some are imperial).  

So I spent a happy hour or so with a set of callipers and a ruler trying to identify  all the various bolts and tick them off against the supplied lists.  I also had the AK build manual to hand to assist (although the fact that the AK Nut and Bolt list is largely in metric but the AK Build Manual refers to many of the washers in imperial sizes does confuse things slightly).

Having (successfully?!) identified all the fixings, I separated them into individual labelled bags, so that as the build progresses I can identify all the fixings needed for each stage. (I did seem to be short of 4No 35mm by 14mm washers - but on the plus side I had a extra 2No M10x30 bolts and an extra 14No M8by25 bolts!!!).

It seems that the nut/bolt kit is pretty comprehensive - containing the majority of the required fixings for the chassis / suspension build stage.  So I suppose I was a bit surprised / disappointed that they couldn't supply all the required fixings.  I know some will be specific to the year / model of the donor vehicle and get that they can't cater for all cases.  

But, for example, the build manual indicates that some M6 machine screws and M6 washers are needed to set the caster angles on the front suspension but these are not included. Neither are the M10by70 bolts, M10 washers and M10 Nylocs required to fix the steering rack.  Or the M12 Nylocs to fix the rear control arm bracket onto the diff......

Maybe I'm being overly picky - but having provided 95% of the fixings, it would be much effort (or cost) to supply the remaining 5% of fixings where the sizes are known (and not dependant on donor parts).