Stuck Ford Head Bolts: Heat, Wax, and a Ruined Head

If you saw my first video in this teardown series, you know I broke six bolts taking just the top end off this engine: two exhaust bolts, two water pump bolts, and two bolts when removing the intake. Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bull’s Garage. After that happened I asked the internet for help and got lots of suggestions — everything from heat and heat cycles to using a torch, a welder, a hammer, candle wax, crayons, freezing, and more penetrating oil. Basically people told me to throw the entire periodic table at this engine. Some even said to throw the engine in a river and never speak of it again. We’re not doing that. Today I’m going back at it to try to get these bolts out using the information I gathered from your responses, and we’ll see what happens. These bolts will be out of this head; whether the head is usable again, we’ll see. Stick around. If you’ve torn down old crusty engines before, there’s a good chance you’ve snapped a bolt. Here’s the situation: the broken bolts are on the heads and the timing cover. None of those are parts I need for this build. I probably won’t keep the heads and I’ll toss the timing cover. I don’t have years of experience tearing down engines, so this is a perfect opportunity to learn how to remove difficult bolts on parts I don’t care about. Hopefully you can learn along with me, or laugh because you’ve done this a million times and know what I’m doing wrong. Of the six bolts, four are in cast iron — two still have a lot of thread and two are broken almost flush with the head. The other two up here are in aluminum; those are the two exhaust bolts. Here are the two water pump bolts. Here is the better of the two top intake bolts, and here is the really scary one. First I’ll try to do this without welding the front two. I’m almost certain I’ll need to weld the others, but I’ll try these without welding. I’ll grind a couple of flats on the bolts, get some heat on them, and use a good strong pair of vice grips with penetrating oil to wriggle them loose. Get the grips on as tight as my fingers can stand. Now I’m heating up the timing cover because it’s aluminum — aluminum expands faster than steel, so with heat I hope to rock the bolt free. Let’s see if we can wiggle it free. I’m getting some movement. It’s actual movement, not just shifting gasket material. All right, I’ll come around to get more leverage and hit it again. It stinks like hell, but it’s not hurting anything. It’s turning — it’s rough, but it’s turning. Part of the trick is to wiggle back and forth. If you just keep going the same direction, you’ll bind it up and risk snapping it. I think I’m going to be able to get this out. It’s starting to get squishy on me. That makes a big difference. It’s starting to cool off on me. That puppy was caught in there, but we got it. The trick is heating and cooling cycles and a lot of penetrating oil. There it goes. The interior threads on these are so messed up that at some point it’s not even unthreading. I’m just wiggling it straight out — I have to pull out and turn to get it to move. Checking my camera to make sure you can see this crusty son of a… Look at that thing. I could try the same thing over here. This bolt is already pretty well munged up, so I might try it because if I screw it up I can still weld a nut onto the end. Let’s give that a try. That helps suck the penetrating oil up into the grooves. We’ll get this on there and see if we can get it to move. Move for me. Come on. It feels like it might be. Nope. I’m just twisting the end; I don’t see any movement at the head. You know what? That just popped right off. That was worth the experiment. I still got plenty of meat here. So this exhaust bolt really refused to cooperate, and this is where things started going sideways. I didn’t get a good weld on there. What I’m trying to do is weld a nut onto the broken stud and back it out. In theory that gives me a fresh surface to grab, plus a bunch of heat right where I need it. In practice, not so much. I’m not getting a good weld. I’m pretty sure the steel stud is basically bonded to the cast iron head at this point, and cast iron is really good at pulling heat away. Instead of the weld puddle flowing down into the stud and really fusing, most of the heat is getting sucked down into the head. Hold on. That looks good. This is so janky. Oh my goodness. Am I just that bad of a welder? Maybe I am. The nut looks welded, but the stud itself isn’t actually becoming part of the weld. This is why I start using a torch to preheat the stud — hot enough to hopefully give me a little better fusion this time. I’ll be honest: I’m not an experienced welder. I didn’t want to crank the voltage and start blasting because I didn’t want to make things worse or damage the head even more. So I’m trying to walk that line between getting enough heat and not going full grill on it. Nope. This is frustrating. At this point in the video, this is before I asked the internet for advice. No wax, no crayons, no freeze spray, no exotic tricks yet. This is just me, a welder, a torch, penetrating oil, and a whole lot of stubbornness. And yeah, this bolt is not impressed. All right, guys. I’m going to have to come back to this one — I’m running out of camera time. One time a really good friend of mine said, “Ed, with all of your extensive experience tearing down engines, what is your absolute favorite part of doing an engine teardown on a 30-year-old crusty Ford engine?” And you know what I said? I said, “My friend, easily my favorite part of doing an engine teardown is all of the broken bolts.” I love that part. Yeah, everything I just said is completely not true. I don’t have any friends. Hello. All right, guys, round two with the bolts from hell. I’ve been waiting to do this for like three weeks. The very first thing I’m going to do is whack this a few times with a hammer to get some shock into it, and then I’m going to pull on it and see if it comes loose. This thing has been sitting here cold for about three weeks after I welded this nut on. I’ve added a little bit of penetrating fluid over that time on and off a few days, so it has had plenty of time to sit. We’re going to see if any of that made a difference. I’m just going to whack it with a hammer — that will be test number one. We’ll see if that did anything. Well, it rounded it so I couldn’t get the socket on. That’s what it did. There we go. Okay. I’m not feeling any movement here. There’s a little bit of sponginess right up there on the top, so I’m thinking that didn’t do it. The next thing I’m going to do is warm it up and throw some freeze-off on it and see if that takes care of it. For those yelling about the torch in my short, this is actually a MAP gas torch — MAP gas, not oxy-acetylene. The idea is to get it super hot and then hit it with freeze-off to thermal cycle it. There’s also penetrating fluid in the freeze-off. Now, a lot of folks said to try tightening it first and then loosening it, so I’m going to try that. I’m not getting anything on tightening — just a little sponginess. It’s entirely possible I’ve already sponged this bolt to the point where it’s not going to come out, but there’s no movement whatsoever. Well, that didn’t work on this particular bolt. Now, supposedly candle wax down inside the threads is supposed to get in here and… Lubricate. I’m not sure how much wax I’m supposed to use, but there’s certainly quite a bit down in there. You can see how much came off the candle. I don’t want to gunk it up too much. They didn’t say either way, so I’ll let that cool for a little bit. Maybe I’ll try it while it’s warm, then let it cool and try it again to test both ways. I’m trying to use patience here and work it back and forth. A lot of people said to be patient and work it back and forth as much as you can: tighten, then loosen, then tighten, then loosen. I’m not feeling any movement other than a little sponginess. You can see how quickly, even with the torch, cast iron pulls the heat out. It cools off really fast. The next thing I’ll try is a crayon, but this time I’ll heat the bolt instead of the heads so the crayon will wick down. I’m going with red—the color of despair and anger. It didn’t take very much; it melted pretty quick. I’ll let that cool and see what happens. In the meantime, I’ll get this one started so I can weld it on nice and tight. One thing I learned when welding this last time is to preheat with a torch before you start to weld, because cast iron pulls heat away from the stud so fast that it’s hard to get a solid weld. If you heat it first and then quickly hit it with the welder, it’s sort of preheated and gives better adhesion, or at least it seems that way. We’re nice and hot now. I’m leaving this with everything I’ve got. This one’s cooled off; the crayon should be down in there. We’ll give this one a try. The top is moving, but the bottom is not. I can actually see where the shear is happening. I think we’re going to break that one. In this case, the shear is well below where my weld is, so the weld is holding even if it’s ugly. Here’s what I’ll do: one more heat cycle on each of these, then hit them with candle wax again. Maybe the crayon down in here and the candle wax on top—if I heat them, the crayon will go down further. I really don’t know; I just want to give these every shot. If it wasn’t for trying to make this for YouTube and to teach myself, I would have broken these off a long time ago. I’m trying to find a good way to show how to get these out, something that works. All right, I’ll cool those down to try to get their strength back. They’re being warmed up; I’ll come back and wrench on them one last time. When I come back, they’ll either come out of the engine or they’ll snap, and we’ll see. Okay, here we go. See, it’s… Starting to shear right in here. These bolts may just not come out this way. There’s only so much patience I’m willing to expend on getting these out of here. Oh—looks like we might have some movement here, as a matter of fact. Okay, let’s not go too fast. We’ll bring it back just a little bit. Well, look at that, boys and girls. I’ll be damned. I was being so careful not to break it off that I didn’t want to put too much force into it, but that little bit of extra force is what got it out. Look at that thing. Just ignore my awful welding job. All right, well that one’s out. I might save that son of a bitch. The one I just took out I’ve only been fighting today. This one I’ve been fighting for weeks. So I’m going to do the same thing: just start twisting. Even though I feel like it’s going to break, I’m just going to keep going. Same deal—slow, even pressure—and we’re just going to keep moving. Even if it feels like it’s going to break, tighten and loosen back and forth a little bit. Oh yeah, that’s going to break. No question. Yep, right there. Like I said, I’ve been fighting this one for a week. I’m not sure there’s enough on there to weld a nut onto. I’m going to try to build up a little bit of weld on here and then do one more nut and see if I can get this out. See, it’s moving, but I don’t think it’s moving the stud. Nah, no—that was my weld that snapped off. So what that means is now it’s time to grind this flush, punch it, and drill it. Never done this before either. Wish me luck. Obviously you want to try to center this as much as possible. This is why machine shops get paid good money to do this kind of stuff. But if I paid a machine shop to do this, I wouldn’t learn anything. That’ll give me a nice spot to start my drilling. What I’ve got here is a relatively cheap reverse drill bit from Harbor Freight. I’m going to try to do the best job I can, go straight on as much as possible, start with a smaller bit first, and then walk my way up in sizes until I get to something that might actually extract this thing. Slow and steady is how I’m going to approach this. Well, that didn’t last very long, did it? I’d say that’s a pretty damning review of Harbor Freight’s reverse drill bits. It didn’t even last one second. I get what I get, I guess. I may have been pushing too hard. They are cutting pretty well, so maybe I was just pushing too hard. Where’s the bottom? Pretty close. Oh, okay. Yep, I’m down to the bottom. I’m not sure how big I can realistically go here without damaging. What happened there? Hopefully when I screw up, you won’t. I screwed up drilling out this bolt because I went too deep and now I’m in one of the water jackets. Let me show you what I mean: flashlight right down there into the water jacket hole. Here you can clearly see the light coming in through the hole that I just made in this head. So yes, this head is trash. Luckily it’s a truck head and it doesn’t really matter to me. I found this experience much more valuable as a lesson and actually the value of Whatever this head is, I knew going in that I could screw something up like this. I’m still going to pull it off and go through how it works later, but I drilled too deep and busted right through into the water jacket. It’s close; there’s not a lot of give on the bottom of those exhaust bolt holes before you get into a cavity. That’s why I’m doing this—to learn. If I cared about the heads, I would take them to a machine shop. Instead I’m going to continue by getting the bolts out of the intake holes in the front of the engine that I also broke and see what I can do. Those are an opportunity to learn, not just a pain. My plan is to weld some buildup on top of each of these studs and try again with new nuts. We’ll use the freeze-off crayon wax just like before to see if they’ll move. These bolts go all the way through, so there’s an opening on the bottom of these heads. I can’t make the same mistake of drilling too deep; the only thing I can do is drill off-center and mess up the holes. These should be easier even if I end up drilling them out. One way or another, these bolts are coming out on camera today. Woohoo! My weld didn’t stick; there’s a lot of crud in there and I forgot how hot things are. It would get right there and then die. I had a little wiggle room and that’s it—I was worried about breaking or cutting them, but I got one out. It’s easy to drill. All right: six stuck bolts, six successfully removed, and only one head completely destroyed. I’m doing this to learn, because reading a book or watching a video doesn’t help me as much as doing it. I hope this helps you a little. If you want to save your heads, maybe you can avoid the same mistakes I made. These heads are coming off and going in the garbage; I’ll replace them with some aftermarket aluminum heads for my stroker build. The bottom line is we got all the bolts out, and I only made one truly horrible mistake out of six broken bolts, so that’s a win for my first time. I don’t know if the wax or crayons were what let me get the few out successfully, but that stuff didn’t hurt, and a box of crayons is cheap, so consider using them if you’re tackling an engine like this. I also learned that heat is important, as many of you told me. The next part is taking the heads off, which we’ll do in the next video. Stick around for the rest of the build series if you want to see that. Make sure that you subscribe — I’ll be doing this whole thing for the first time ever. I won’t be editing much out other than the boring parts, so if you want to see that, make sure you subscribe and you’ll see more of me screwing up. Thanks again for watching. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or internet ramblings, put them below and we will see you next time. If you want to dig deeper into the builds, the side projects, and the stuff that doesn’t always make it on YouTube, or just want to get to know me better, come hang out on patreon.com/bullnose Garage. It helps keep the lights on — beer-fueled. I appreciate you guys being part of the garage. Around the edges she’s doing fine. Take her head away. Getting things to shine at Moon’s garage; she’s considered divine. Thanks again for watching. We will see you next time.