I guess I'm going to die just any day now when my steering nuts and bolts
fail from being reused.
Steering bolts and nuts are made extremely well.  Steering is even more
critical that brakes actually.   I have put hundreds of those back together
with the same fasteners. And I darn sure wouldn't be replacing original
german parts with anything from a hardware store !
  If you put them back together carefully and good n' tight.........the
chance of them failing is nil.  Unless you do something dumb like don't
tighten properly, or extremely over tighten them etc.   I might make a lot
of things tighter than the published toques btw, sometimes they'll have like
18 ft. lbs on a bolt and that's not much at all.  It depends. 
Scott
www.turbovans.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: Vanagon Mailing List [mailto:vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com] On Behalf Of
Allan Streib
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 7:08 PM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: nuts in steering linkage and rack

In the illustration of the steering system, (48.4) Bentley notes
"always replace" indicating the nuts.  I assume from this that these
are single-use, self-locking nuts.  Are these pretty easy to source at
a hardware store?  Hate to have to go to the dealer, but at the same
having these fastenrs loosen up would definitely be "bad".

Allan