I had an exhaust leak coming from the pass. side area, and I soon determined it was the infamous EGR pipe. Got that welded and taken care of but now i've got a broken/frozen upper stud in the passenger side exhaust manifold to cat.

How would i get this removed without having to take off the ex. manifold? It had to be the top stud that gave me the problems, so i can't really get leverage with a vise grip to remove since the bottom two studs are blocking me from doing so.

I've tried heating it up with propane, PB blasting the crap out of it and it still won't budge.

Any suggestions?

 

It will probably take an acetylene torch and also welding a nut on to it since you don't have any room for vise grips. Is that a spherical joint and cracked down in side the hole?

 

i'm not sure, i think that's how the manifold was? The only leak i was getting was the EGR tube

 

can u spray it from the top or is the mainfold closed off? in other words can u see the threads from above

 

You sure it can even screw out? Might need to be punched/pressed out, which I doubt you'll be able to do with the manifold on the car, at least without damaging the manifold.

 

it's certainly a screw-in stud. looks like you've exhausted (no pun intended) your options with simple hand tools. how about this, i know you mentioned using PB blaster but soak it overnight and try again.
they also make a bolt extractor tool you can purchase.
if all fails, i'm with dicer on welding on a nut method.

 

You will need a blow torch and a stud extractor.

 

So i bought a stud extractor and borrowed my coworker's MAP gas torch. Heated it up for about 5 min. with the MAP gas and put this Titan stud extractor i found at O'Reilly's and ended up snapping the stud flush with the flange. Was actually incredibly strong at gripping the stud, but the stud was too frozen in the flange.




So, i went to Lowe's and got an extractor kit, drilled a hole in the stud, but was off center by a lot, so i messed that part up. Extractor then was pretty much useless.

Ended up just drilling through everything with consecutively larger drill bits and ended up with a bigger and bigger hole, finally the slug of a stud that was left fell out. Finished up by drilling the hole where the slug fell out and now i'm just going to put a bolt with a nut over both flanges to secure it.

This one stud, exhausted a couple hours of labor just to get out, first to remove the original nut then with Vise grips, followed by Vise grips and propane, then stud extractor and MAP gas then finally drilling though the bastard. Been dreading this for two days!

I'm pooped. But at least I can now securely mount the Cat. without worrying about it leaking.

Now just to put the EGR tube and assemble everything.....ugh.

 

Yeah from years of doing mechanics I have found it easier and less time consuming to just get stuff out of the way, especially this sort of thing that you battle till its messed up. I've used stud removers but I didn't think that would be easy to find. I had no idea Oreillys had them. If you would have got it glowing red hot you would not have broken the stud off.

 

Left hand drill bits used with an appropriate drill also work well. First hole needs to be reasonably well centered in the broken stud tho. The increasingly bigger bits will back the stud out as they remove material and loosen it up.

 

And if they would have used stainless steel studs it wouldn't have seized in the hole.

 

... or anti seize?

 

Good to know. A blow torch for the nuts and a oxyacetylene (welding) torch for the studs (getting it glowing red).

 

My gosh I hate that picture. Just installed an EGR pipe in my car last week and I sure wasn't happy with the amount of work it took.

 

glad to hear it's solved. can't believe it was frozen that badly.

i too just endured the dreaded EGR pipe replacement. for me i couldn't reach the very top bolt to remove the pipe from the intake manifold. all that work and the last bolt actually stripped and stopped me! i ended up paying $400 for a shop to finish what i couldn't. i was heartbroken to say the least!