As many of you know, I’ve spent the last few years fixing up 2 old motorcycles. When working on anything older – especially if someone else before you owned it for a while – there’s a very good chance of running into stripped bolts. And by stripped bolts, I mean the head is rounded so you can’t get a socket wrench or box wrench to actually grip the head of the bolt.<\/p>\n
One common way to solve this problem is to get the biggest pair of vice-grips you can to clamp onto the bolt as hard as you can (be prepared to bruise the insides of your hands a bit), and use that to turn the bolt. I’ve had quite a bit of success with this. I even managed to use this technique to remove a bolt whose head had completely snapped off and I was just grabbing a small bit of the threaded bolt itself.<\/p>\n
However, sometimes you don’t have enough room to do this. Or sometimes it simply doesn’t work. Another common technique is to drill the bolt out. There are two ways of doing this. One involves finding a drill bit the exact width of the bolt (not including the threads), and drilling exactly down the bolt so that there’s no bolt left (the bits of metal consisting of the threads should fall out fairly easily). This requires absolute perfection<\/strong> on both the sizing of the bit and the drilling itself. If you’re slightly off center, you’ll screw up the threaded hole that the bolt goes into. The other method is to drill a smaller hole into the middle of the bolt and use a special counter-threaded drill bit that you screw into the hole you just made. Due to the counter-threading, as you tighten it’ll grab the inside of the bolt and (hopefully) unscrew it. This method is slightly safer than the other drill method, but can also be very easy to screw up.<\/p>\n