Sound words from BoltScience man. As he says, parts designed to be bolted together like this use the bolts' clamping force to give the friction force required to prevent relative movement. They are not designed to be used in shear - that is a job for pins, not bolts. The BoltScience website is a really useful guide for bolted-assemblies design and I heartily recommend it having learned from it when I started designing such things for my job.
Just to clarify something, what bike are you fitting these callipers to as the length of the M10 bolt may be different to what I quoted ? The M10x35 is for a 750SS.
Just thought I would post a photo of the callipers with standard bolt heads (8mm) rather than the low profile (5 mm) bolts. You will notice from the photo that the relationship between the top of the bolt head and the calliper body is common to both of the inner pinch bolts and both of the outer pinch bolts are different again. So even with the low profile bolt heads you will still not have any uniformity of top of bolt to calliper body. Has anyone replaced the clevis pins and “R” clips with stainless steel ones?
One final thing I have just found. As you can see from the photo I have replaced the banjo bolts and bleed nipples. When the bleed nipples arrived they were all M10 x 1.0 which is fine for the rear calliper but too big for the fronts which need to be M8 x 1.25. When I spoke to my supplier they said that they were relying on information provided by Hel. So I put it down to misinformation but if you look at the torque settings in the Ducati workshop manual there is only one entry for bleed nipples and it refers to them in the plural. So Ducati got it wrong. Also when ordering parts do not rely solely on the part numbers, always describe the part you are after as I found that the part numbers for the front indicators were transposed. Ducati wrong again. Caveat Emptor
Billy don't confuse Brake Bleed Connectors or Bleed Unions with Bleed Nipples, they are not the same thing. In the Factory manual for my MY02 748 for example the torque settings page for the brakes clearly shows a different setting specified for the nipples (which on my bike are only 6 and 8mm) and for Bleed Unions (which are 10mm x1mm) Although I would never use a torque wrench on a bleed nipple anyway. It looks like the bleed nipple sizes are MY and type specific. The factory manuals are also reissued for each model and MY, often updated through the MY based on factory part supply changes so the settings/thread specified in the book needs to checked against the part. As you suggest, the only safe way is to measure before buying.
Denzil, definitely no confusion. You can see from the extract above they use the terms brake hose connectors and brake bleed connectors, the word nipple is not used (how many posts is that going to generate?). As for currency of my Workshop manual I bought my machine the October of the MY and didn’t purchase the workshop manual until the following year. When I reported the error to my supplier they were able to see if this had occurred before, it had, twice so hopefully they will now amend their system accordingly. By the way I assume you are a Python fan?
2001 900 SSie front calliper bolt is M10 x 20 x 1.25 (metric fine) despite the Ducati workshop manual telling you that it’s 1.5
If all you are after is to tidy up an alloy or carbon steel bolt why not consider an alternative solution to replacement with DIY zinc or nickel passivated re-plating of the original bolts. There are plenty of videos on YouTube to show you how.
