When an Easy Out Fails
When our engine cooling pump started to leak anti freeze on Star I was not too alarmed as I considered it a simple matter to unbolt the old and attach a new one which only costs around $150. I am pretty handy with a wrench so one night I started to unbolt the pump when without hardly any torque being applied a bolt broke off and then two more. The bolts had been in the engine for 20 years and had almost completely rusted through. Naturally my first attempt at fixing the problem was to not fix it. I liberally applied lots of Red silicone gasket material and rebolted the pump to the engine. Nine of the twelve bolts were OK so I thought I had a pretty good shot at the simple fix. This seemed to actually work and I was feeling good but within a week it was leaking anti freeze all over the engine and directly on top of the fan belt.
My next step was to try the “Easy Out”. Now I have worked with these before and met with very limited success, so this time I invested in a $35 job that was made of extra extra hardened steel. I had to travel 80 miles to purchase this beauty from an “Industrial Supply House” on the other side of Baltimore. You know the kind of place. They normally don’t sell to the general public because the use of their products by ordinary people would easily put the professionals out of business. I had to beg and plead with them to take my money and I was confident that I had the solution when they finally relented and sold me the Nuclear Hardened Easy Out. I carefully drilled a small hole down the center of the broken bolt and inserted the “Easy Out”. I started to apply a slight torque expecting the bolt to literally jump right out of the engine when to my horror it too broke right off. Now I was really panicked because I had a hardened steel Easy Out embedded in a bolt frozen in the engine. Attempts to use my drill completely failed as this was a real hard piece of metal and it had broken off at an angle so any attempt to drill it out resulted in the drill slipping off the Easy out into the soft metal of the engine.
I was still optimistic the next day when I went to work where they have a very large machine shop that actually makes multi million dollar tools for the military. They work with big stuff here and the machines weight hundreds of tons. I talked to some of the head machinists about my difficulty. Big problem they said… there was no way to easily remove an “Industrial Grade Hardened Steel Easy Out”. The only way they said was to remove the engine and bring it to a machine shop (if you could find one) with a special heavy duty drill press using “Industrial Grade Hardened Drills”.
Now I am really depressed and thoughts of the cost of a new engine are circulating around in my head. For weeks I did not know what to do and the more people I talked to the more depressed I got.
Then one day I happened to be walking around Wal Mart. Now I really enjoy walking around old hardware stores and looking at tools but I don’t often do this at a Wal Mart where the tools if you can call it that are more suitable for perhaps hanging drapes. I came to a rack, however, that offered diamond tipped grinding bits for a Dremel tool that were being sold for 2 for $3. The business end of the head was almost too small to be seen but it was made of diamond. What the heck I thought I will give anything a try.
I brought the bit down to the boat and simply could not believe what happened next. I only had to touch that 20,000 rpm diamond tipped bit to the steel and the “Industrial Grade Hardened Easy Out” along with the rusted bolt to boot were reduced to powder within 5 minutes. The other two broken bolts suffered the same fate. The precision with which I could use this tool, which was almost too small to be seen, meant that I only had to retap the first hole with a larger thread. The other two bolts were removed cleanly with lots of thread still in place. The pump went back on and does not leak.
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