If you're like me and you like to tighten all the bolts of whatever it is that you're working on with a Powerhandle, even if it's a little 10mm bolt. Then you most likely have experienced having the bolt snap as you were tuning away to heart's content thinking it's not quite tight enough yet.
This came to haunt me yesterday while I was working on my car. I took apart the front cover of my engine to check the camshaft oil seal so I had to remove everything down to the timing belt. After all the effort of putting it back together- which included putting back the timing belt that for some reason always causes me busted knuckles- I finally got to some of the the last parts of assembly which was bolting on the crankshaft pulley. Really for the life of me, I cannot understand why it has to be secured with 4 tiny 10mm bolts when they could have designed it to use a more 'man sized' 12 or even 14mm bolt. Anyway just as I was happily using my Powerhandle to torque down the bolts I realized that these were tiny bolts and that I should be careful to lest I snap one, then I did! (again~)
There are some pretty nifty tools that can be used should something like this happen. We actually have one in the shop it's called a thread extractor and is powered by either a reversible hand held drill or a drill press, although personally I'd only use it with the press. This does have some limits though as you need SPACE to use it! When your talking about the crankshaft pulley in a FR (Front engine Rear wheel drive) car you don't have that luxury of space between the front of the engine and the back of the radiator. It's only around 5 inches in the case of the '79 Lancer which is definitely not big enough to fit even the hand held drill. The normal procedure for this then would be to remove the crankshaft's timing belt sprocket (to where the crank pulley bolts too) so that the drill press could be used to extract the broken thread of the bolt that was left inside. It sounds simple enough but that would mean taking apart everything I had just worked on! When it's late in the afternoon after a long day you'd rather be celebrating a job well done rather than undoing all your work. I was determined to try and find a way to get the thread out without taking the engine apart.
I tried a number of things that were pretty stupid so I'd rather not share those. Then an idea just popped into my head (a figurative light bulb going off on top of my head) why not try to glue something to the thread so that it can be turned out. This is pretty much what the thread extractor does anyway- it goes in there and secures itself on the broken thread so that when you reverse rotation of the drill it will come out. I rummaged through my tool box and found a little pencil which seemed perfect for the job. I superglue'd it to the end of the broken thread and carefully turned it out...
Success!! I was pretty stoked when I got it out and immediately thought that this would make a good story for the blog :p
So there. If ever you find yourself in the same situation you know what to do. Remember though that more power really is not the solution for everything- using more lubricant is (but that's a story for another day).
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