Broke bolt in new head (Kinda Long)
 

So, I recieved my new crate motor from Ford the other day and I was installing my cobra lower intake manifold onto the motor when the front bolt stopped about 3/4 of the way down. I could not back it out either, so it was stuck. I figured that I would give it some elbow grease to try to back it out. Needless to say my ARP stainless bolt snapped on my aluminum head. Now the bolt is recessed a bit in the head with no way for me to get at it. I took the head off and went to a few machine shops but did not get very good responses. Alot of the "we will give it a shot" answers. Anybody have any ideas on what I should do here?

Not sure why the bolt got stuck in the first place, but I guess that's a moot point now.

I'm surprised at two things:

1) that the ARP bolt broke (were you really cranking on it? An intake bolt should have no more than say 25 ft-lbs); and

2) that the machine shops didn't seem real confident about getting the bolt out.

A good friend of mine had a stock valve cover bolt break-off in his Avenger heads and the machine shop was able to get it out and put a coil back in. Looked brand new - no problems.

Any other engine/machine shops in your area that you could try?

Good luck,
E

I was quite surprised at how easily the bolt broke also. Very little force was applied to snap it, I didn't even get a chance to really lean on it. It was part of the complete engine bolt kit that they sell, it is worthless as far as I am concerned. I was able to use only about 1/2 of the bolts, all of the others were not the correct size.
My biggest concern is that there is only about a half inch of metal between the sanpped bolt location and the end of the head. That does not leave much room for error. If that piece snaps there goes the whole thing. I am amazed that I cannot find a decent shop around here, I live on Long Island and there are quite a few places to go but nobody sounds confident about the job at hand. One guy actually had the balls to tell me that it was a ford head. I think that I would know that. Needless to say he won't be seeing me.

I was not very surprised to hear that a stainless steel bolt broke off. Did you use anti-seize when installing the bolt? Stainless is very susceptible to galling. You can drill the bolt out yourself and install a heli-coil but be careful as to not break the tap, those are much more difficult to remove.

After building a machine a work with several hundred thousand stainless steel bolts I will never put one in without anti-sieze.


Steven

I work in a machine shop. It is almost impossible to get a stainless bolt out of aluminum with out making a huge mess of it. If you are lucky they can drill it out and put a heli-coil in but I doubt it.

I had a spark plug do sumthing similar one time. I ran it in 4 or 5 turns by hand then it got a little hard so i put the wrench on it. I turned it another turn or so and it kept getting harder. I said sumthing ain't right! When I tried to back it out, it turned just a little and got REALLY hard to turn. I put a little muscle into it and got it out. I inspected the threads and there was a defect. It looked like a little barb, kinda like a fish hook. It only mangled about 2 threads in the head, so there was plenty of meat left for the plug to thread into.

Ever since then, I quite trusting company's to do what their supposed to... lol and try to inspect things more to find sumthing before it causes any damage.

You can try one of those screw extractors... but with a hardened bolt, I doubt you'll get anywhere.

I snapped the screw extractor inside the already snapped screw! ARRRRGHHHH!!!!
I took mine to a machine shop, and had them EDM it out. THis is a Star Wars type Electronic Discharge Machine (plasma cutter?) that literally vaporizes the bolt outt there! Was fairly expensive to do, but it did work.