How To Remove A Broken Bolt 6 DIFFERENT WAYS - LS Exhaust Manifold

hello i'm jeremy and this is a 5.3 liter lm7 with 260 000 miles on it as you probably know these manifold bolts all break off in the cylinder head and then you have to figure out how to get them out now mine only has one broken off bolt so what i'm gonna do to make my life miserable is i'm gonna cut the heads off these other bolts which i haven't turned with a wrench yet so they are seized in there good and i'm gonna cut the heads of the bolts off i'm gonna pull the manifold off and then i'm going to show you how to remove all of these broken slash rusty cut off bolts from the cylinder head so let's get started [Music] so i've now just cut the heads off of all the bolts so we have one two three four five that we've cut the head bolts off and then this guy in the back that was already not there so now let's see if the manifold pops off there it is all right now a few of you may be saying i could just grab those with vice grips that's so easy jeremy so you know what i'm going to do i'm going to cut a couple of them off flush with the cylinder head just to make it even harder so let's keep cutting [Music] these two bolts are now cut off smooth with the cylinder head and i even ground them down so they're flush so now we've got broken off bolt broken off bolt broken off bolt cut off flush cut off flush and then broken off bolt so now let's get to actually removing some of these things i think i'm going to start with just a pair of vice grips on this end and see if we can pull one out so we'll get the vice grips on now you want to have vice grips with some teeth left if you've if you use these uh vice grips for a while you wear off the teeth and then you don't have any grip so we're going to make sure we get a pair with some grip okay so those things are clamped on there good now oh wow this is going to be easy okay so this one's going to pop right out so if you happen to have a stud sticking out some vice grips might just work alright so the first option of vice grips total success so the next one is obviously a broken off stud and what we're gonna do is we're going to double nut it so you put on one nut and then you put on another one right behind it and then if you turn the first one that's closest to the head it will actually get tight and it will pull the stud out now this is a 8 by 1.25 thread pitch so what i'm going to do since the end of this stud is kind of mangled a little bit from me cutting it off i'm gonna throw a die on it and we're gonna clean up the threads and then we're gonna put two nuts on it so let's get started squeaky squeaky squeaky squeaky squeaky squeaky squeaky squeaky squeaky squeaky squeaky squeaky squeaky so we've now cleaned up the threads so they look really good and now i'm going to throw two nuts on here so i'm going to put the first one on and kind of snug it up a little bit all right so it's on there good now we're going to put the second one on we'll tighten that one up okay so now you're going to need two wrenches in this case i'm using two half inch wrenches because i got nuts that are half inch so i'm gonna put them on here and we're gonna turn them both at the same time hopefully have this thing come loose you want to tighten them up against each other first like that okay so now hopefully it cracks loose nope nothing so far tighten them up a little bit more when in doubt i like to add fire well at least you know this is a real video right because if it worked perfectly the first time you'd probably know i was faking it i may have moved oh yeah there we go okay so i could see that the center of the bolt moved right there it does take a little trial and error to get it perfect but it looks like it's going to come out now it sure is tight though this is probably super hot let's see nope i can still hold it so it's not that hot alright so you can see that this came out so we're now done with two different methods both were successful let's move on to the third next on the list we're going to pull this stud out by welding a nut to it now you can use pretty much any size nut you want but what we're going to do is we're going to put a nut over it we're going to weld the nut to the stud and then we're going to twist the nut and hopefully the stud will come out now one thing to note on this is if you are welding this well the engine is still in the car unlike me um make sure you disconnect your battery because if you're welding stuff to a car with the battery plugged in you risk burning up uh the computer the modules things like that so make sure you unplug your battery and use of course all the safety precautions if you're going to be doing any welding and let's weld this thing up so one thing we want to do is we want to use lots of heat and probably lower wire speed now i'm just going to use a mig welder that i have but you can use a tig welder you could use a stick welder you can pretty much use any kind of welder you want so we're going to go ahead and weld this puppy up all right i couldn't have welded it more crooked but we're gonna try and get it off anyways all right so let's spin that nut now rather than grabbing this with my fingers like the last one i'm gonna grab it with the vice grip so i don't burn the hell out of myself all right we've done it we've pulled three of the six studs out that's pretty good all right let's move on to the hard ones so these are getting harder now we've got the next two are cut even with the head so sometimes your bolt breaks off either even with the head or even slightly below the head surface and that makes it pretty challenging but i'm going to show you what to do so actually before i show you that some people will just take a a nut and they will put it on here and they will weld right down the center of the nut but i find that a little more challenging so what i like to do is i take a washer and i weld the stud to the washer and then i weld the nut to the washer so that's what we're gonna do right now let's weld up the broken off stud to the washer and see how far that gets [Music] us [Music] okay so now let's see if it will spin it's probably gonna break off let's see oh my goodness i think my help my weld is holding as sketchy as this looks i think we're i think we're going to be successful all right sweet success i'm actually very surprised that that held but you can see that this actually works pretty well you just gotta weld the washer to the stud and then the nut to the washer doesn't matter how ugly it looks this is not a show piece but we got the stud out so now let's do the worst one of all so my most hated way of removing broken bolts is by far using a drill bit and extractors for me it works like less than 50 of the time what usually happens is i drill the hole i pop this in and sometimes i'll break this off sometimes it'll just strip out and it won't come out so it ends up being a fight so using the welding method or the vice grips or something like that has a way higher success rate for me at least but i'm going to show you how to do this and we're going to hope like heck it works so what we've got is a drill bit and an extractor so what we're going to do is we're going to drill right down the center of this bolt then we're going to slam the extractor in there and we're going to try and pull this broken stud out with the extractor so let's get this started so the first step is to center punch the stud so that when i drill the drill bit doesn't wander all over the place so we're going to try and get this in the center as close as we can maybe right here so now i've got this dot in the center that's exactly where i'm going to drill let's start drilling [Applause] never hurts to put a little lube on it now you do have to make sure you don't drill in too deep if you're drilling too deep you're going to drill into the head of course and that would be bad so what you can do is if you have another bolt out you can put the drill bit in and see how far it goes in and that way you know you know you can drill about that far in why don't we measure it and see how deep it is holding this against a tape measure looks like it's three quarters of an inch would be safe it looks like it might be slightly more than that let's check some other ones yeah they appear to all be the same depth and it looks like it's just a hair over three quarters of an inch but i'd say three quarters is where i'm definitely going to stop if i even get that far [Music] just going to give this little tap now let's see if it wants to turn it's gonna be a no-go on that one all right gonna drill some more [Music] all right we're gonna pop this bugger right back in there a little tap see if it wants to come out now you're going to be shocked by this but these things are not working for me all right so i guess what i'm going to do now is drill a slightly bigger hole and then we're going to try and collapse the bolt in on itself which i'll show you in just a minute okay so we've now drilled pretty much all the way through the bolt and i'm going to try and just collapse the bolts in on itself as you can see that works pretty well once you've drilled out pretty much the whole center of the bolt you can usually just collapse them and then sometimes you can pull them out with like needle nose pliers or vice grips or something like that it's a pretty miserable process there we go i don't know if you just saw it but the bolt just turned just switching punches so that i can maybe turn this a little better one thing that i i don't know if i actually mentioned it but once you collapse the bolt in on itself then you're trying to basically spin it out until you can grab it with some pliers or some vice grips i think we may be able to grab it with some pliers now maybe [Applause] okay so there we have it it is now out but what you can see is that i didn't drill very straight which means i probably screwed up some of the threads that are in this bolt hole so i think what i'll do is i'll run the tap down there and make sure all the threads are at least mostly back where they were and if you just have one bolt that's like this where the threads aren't perfect you're probably probably going to be all right but i mean if you do this to every single one of your your studs you may need to drill it out and put like a thread cert in there so that you actually have some good threads to attach to so i'm gonna run the tap through there and take a look inside there and see how bad it is and yeah well we get this one out we only got one left that's pretty good we're just going to take an 8 by 1.25 tap and throw it right in here i'm just going to run it in really quick make sure all the threads are still there i'm sure they are i'll probably blow it out with a uh air hose as well just to make sure it's all good yeah it feels fine i'm sure the threads aren't perfect but it's a heck of a lot better than having a broken bolt in there am i right all right now the last bolt right here this is the one that was originally broken off that i didn't even cut off so this one's probably stuck in here pretty good and i think the best way to get that out is to go ahead and weld a turbocharger to it i think i'm just going to weld it straight to the bolt and then if i spin the turbocharger the bolt should come out so let's get started on that see what happens now that we have the turbocharger welded to the exhaust manifold stud that's broken off we are going to go ahead and spin it actually looks like it's spinning pretty easily to remove the exhaust manifold bolt which is snapped off now welded to a turbocharger a fine turbocharger so it looks like welding a turbocharger to a broken exhaust manifold bolt is actually a very effective solution to the problem we're going to go ahead and keep spinning though just to make sure it comes all the way out okay there we have it so it looks like attaching a turbocharger to a broken exhaust manifold bolt is actually a perfectly good solution to removing the bolt all right now that we've got all of them out i think it's probably a good idea to do a quick recap of where we're at so the first option was using vice grips and that method works pretty well i don't know why this bolt was so loose maybe some of yours are as well so hopefully you can grab yours with vice grips and just spin them right out the second option was double nutting it now this works if you have some of the broken bolts sticking out of the head and sometimes you do need to use a torch to also loosen up the bolt as we did in the video but the method does work next welding a nut to the broken off bolt now this works pretty well but you do need to have a welder first of all and you need to have pretty good aim to get the welding the filler down the center of the nut if you don't get it down the center of the nut and you don't get good penetration into the broken off exhaust manifold bolt it's probably going to just snap off the nut now when i was actually doing this in a silverado not too long ago it probably took me three tries to do that um i broke off like two or three of the nuts that i welded on because i just couldn't get a good penetration of the actual broken off bolt so what i ended up doing was doing this method and this method actually works fantastic if you weld a washer to the broken off bolt and then you weld a nut to the washer it just works nearly 100 of the time this is pretty much the method that i go to every time now so i highly recommend this obviously you need a welder to do it but you can use a stick welder you can use a mig welder or a tig welder whatever welder you have you can probably successfully do this with and welders have actually come down and priced quite a bit over the last 10 years so although you know 10 years ago you might have spent a thousand dollars on a welder you can get a cheap one for like 200 bucks now so certainly if you don't have a welder it's a great thing to have it's really helpful when you're dealing with broken off parts so the second to last option was drilling it now this is my most hated method i only do this when everything else fails or if i don't have welding gas or something like that this is my absolute last resort i hate it i tried using the easy out which almost never works for me i think easy outs probably do work if you're putting a bolt in and you snap the head off by accident probably a smaller bolt then i think it would come back out again but when you're dealing with stuff that's been in an engine for 260 000 miles there's just no chance of an easy out working at least in my experience so anyways this is my least favorite it does work but i wouldn't recommend it to a friend and last we have the turbocharger method now this method works fantastic if you have some old turbochargers to weld to your engine i don't know if this is the best method maybe it's not maybe it is i don't know but if you get the old turbocharger hanging around certainly give it a try and if you have other methods of removing bolts from engines or you know broken off situations certainly leave them in the comments because i want to hear about it i need to learn just like you do so leave me a comment be sure to subscribe to the video and maybe even share it with a friend or two and uh hopefully i'll see you on the next one you

Channel: Wiring Rescue

Views: 1,267,611

Keywords: Broken exhaust manifold bolts, How to remove a broken bolt, How to remove a broken stud, How to remove broken bolts, How to remove broken exhaust manifold bolts, How to spin a broken bolt, LS engine exhaust manifold bolts, Proven bolt removal methods, Removing broken bolts, Welding a broken bolt, broken bolt extractor, how to remove broken bolt, Bolt Extractor, Broken Bolt Removal, How to drill a broken bolt, Exhaust manifold bolts, How to extract a bolt

Id: x_ky5JVxtqU

Length: 22min 55sec (1375 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 12 2021