Help! I stripped a bolt @#$@ Cold weather
 

Hello everyone,

So to make a long story short I was trying to remove the EHA on my m103 to "un-adjust" it because i had mistakenly diagnosed and fixed something I inadvertently stripped the torx head of the screw. I am such an idiot i mean the engine IS warm and it IS like 25 degrees in the garage....goshh

what should i do about it? I could just leave it but ever since adjust my fuel economy has been much worse than usual..

thanks,

kris

Well I am not familiar with that car, but it sounds like a likely application for a screw extractor. That is assuming you can not get vice grips on the head of course. As far as screw extractors, I was just at Sears and they had some nifty ones that were sort of like a driver bit, with a drill on one end and the extractor part on the other end. I think they were calling them deck out because they said they could do deck screws. It was a small package with a couple of different sizes. They had a TV showing a demo of it.

Now, I am surprised you stripped a Torx screw. They are specially made not to do that. Were you using an allen wrench (or worse) in it? I confused.

Good luck.

Mike

I'm not familiar with the part you're talking about.
However, if the stripped bolt is attaching two parts together, it may be possible to grind the head off the stripped bolt, and remove the fastened-on part. leaving the stud (bolt with head ground off) sticking out of the fastened-onto part. Now you can use a pipe wrench, vice grips, stud extractor, etc, to remove the stud.
Three methods are used to make bolts and studs come out when they're stuck:
1) weasel piss (WP). This the generic term for penetrating oil. I use it like everyone else, but do not believe it does the slightest bit of good until the stud starts to move. Then if you go back and forth you can get the WP to work its way down the stud and to the threads, and prevent the threads from jamming.
2) Vibration. If you put a wrench on the stud and put a moderate twisting on it, and at the same time ding the end of the stud with a light hammper. Search for the hammer and force that will "ring" the stud, making the hammer bounce back like a live thing. This is highly effective.
3) Heat. So effective that another name for an acetylene torch is the "smoke wrench." If you can heat the part up, this will almost always work because of the simple physics involved. The problems are a) lighting your car on fire with a torch. Which does solve the problem, but not necessarily as you were hoping for. and b) the danger of warping metal, melting plastic, burning off paint, etc. Using direct torch heat on a part requires some experience to have come out right, particularly oxy/acetylene (as opposed to propane/air, which is a much cooler flame) I've had pretty good luck with brass and alu parts by boiling them in a pot of water, or better yet a pressure cooker. I've also made various types of simple "furnaces" to heat complicated parts without exposing them to direct flame. The simplest was a length of stovepipe with caps at each end. The part was put inside, the outside was heated. In that particular case it was heated in the red-hot embers of a workshop barrel stove. The entire part came out glowing dull red, and several broken-off bolts came right out.