The Tale of The Jesus Clip

[MineralMan]

For those with knowledge of working on machinery like automobiles, the mere mention of a Jesus clip is enough to predict my story today.

For others, the meaning will soon be clear.

As it happened, one of my vehicles, the one that tows my boat, needed a new radiator. With fishing season arriving this weekend, it finally became a must-do project, so I tore into it this morning. Now, I hate modern automobiles with a white-hot passion. After removing this and that and unbuilding the car so I could have access to the fasteners that hold the radiator in place, I encountered four metal tubes that insert themselves into said radiator. They connect to cooling assemblies inside the radiator that cool the motor oil and transmission fluid.

Now...back in the sane days of automotive technology, such tubes were held in place by sensible threaded sleeves. To remove them, one applied a wrench to the hexagonal section of the inner sleeve and unscrewed it.

Today, the whims of assembly line gurus dictate that these tubes be held in place by a "quick-connect" fitting. The fitting allows members of the UAW to assemble the tubes with a simple pushing action, rather than the more complex and time consuming process of tightening a threaded connector.

Very sensible and practical. However such an assembly means that a spring clip, made of steel wire is used to hold the fitting together tightly. While it may be "quick-connect" is is far, far from being "quick-disconnect."

In order to disconnect this assembly, one must use a tool of some sort to pry this spring clip from the groove in which it sits. All this, while working in a space crowded by other items. Now, there is a specialized tool that makes this job fairly easy, but it is rather expensive and, for a backyard mechanic, not a practical purchase.

So, after successfuly removing three of the four spring clips and suffering only minor abrasions and one knuckle with less skin that at the beginning, I came to the final clip. It resided under the radiator outlet tube, and was virtually invisible, except for a tiny glimpse if you held your head at just the right angle.

I bent a small screwdriver, then re-bent it several more times to attain precisely the angle needed to pry off this tiny spring. Finally, after several attempts, the spring came off the fitting.

"AW! Jesus!" I cursed. For, when it flew off the fitting, it went somewhere...never to be seen again.

Hence the universal name for such spring retainers on automobiles and other machinery. Jesus Clips they are. Jesus Clips will they always be.

Auto parts stores maintain large stocks of these, for obvious reasons.