[quote=Dogboy]I suspect the original holes were almost certainly drilled with a tapered reamer to match the pin. If you have access to a tapered reamer, I would definitely go that route since it will give a much better fit to the pin, but they are pricey.
I think your tapered sleeve concept looks pretty slick. Probably better than the original design since if the holes in the beam are not perfect or if they wear out, the sleeves can be brought in so both sides of the crossbar maintain full engagement between the sleeve and the individual sets of holes. This should reduce wear and slop.
Just a thought with regard to removing these sleeves/bolts, if you use a fully threaded bolt, you could thread the thru hole in the sleeve that gets installed at the head end of the bolt and thread that sleeve onto the bolt. The sleeve on the opposite end (nut end) just gets a straight thru hole. When you want to remove the sleeves, back off the nut a few turns and then give that end of the bolt a tap with a mallet. This will drive the bolt and the head end sleeve out of the crossbar. Once those are removed, you can come back from the other side of the crossbar and drive the other sleeve out.
sm[/quote]
No HTML tags allowed (except inside [code][/code] tags)