Those of you who went on last week's trial run know that my car was sounding pretty bad. The problem turned out to be an exhaust manifold gasket blown out. The bolts holding the manifold on came out fairly easily, and one of them was already out -- or so I thought. Actually, only half of it was already out, and the other half was still in the head. The bolt was broken.
So now I had the problem of extracting a broken bolt. I went to Lowes, and found something called Grabit Pro, which had three things that looked like this (in different sizes):
There's a stubby reverse drill bit on one end (you have to run the drill in reverse to use it), and the screw thing you see on the other end. I figure the drill bit is reverse, so that in drilling, you don't tighten the broken stub any more than it is. The paper that came with it says it's hard enough to drill a No. 10 hardness bolt.
Drilling the stub wasn't easy. I used a right angle air drill, and I actually had to drill a pilot hole with a smaller bit first. But eventually I got the hole drilled, so I reversed the gadget with the screw end in the hole, and turned it with a socket wrench. And it worked -- the stub came out.
The stub was stuck on the end of that thing so firmly that I had to use pliers to break it off.
So if you have a broken bolt, consider using a Grabit to get it out.
