So basically, a few weeks ago after doing the up pipes, I noticed that there was a bit of an air leak out of the driver's side manifold. I could feel it coming out toward the back, and I could hear the tick from inside the cab. I checked the manifold bolt torque, and the rear three were pretty loose. I tightened them all up, and ordered a new manifold.

Monday morning, figuring how loose the bolts were, I decided to swap the manifold in the truck. One bolt I had tightened broke off flush with the head, and one other bolt (hadn't tightened) rounded off the head. I cut that one flush with manifold with a sawzall, and the manifold fell to the ground. I used some vice grips after a bunch of PB and got that one out.

Not sure what to do with the bolt that broke, which was the furthest back, I think cyl 8, I drilled a small hole, and got an easy out on it. I cracked off the easy out, and was able to use vice grips to get the rest out.

Next, drilled a bit more of the bolt out, and got a bigger easy out. This one broke flush.

This is now Tuesday afternoon, 9 hours into this project. Start cutting the easy out with a saline torch. Make it in most of the way of the easy out. Threads still look good from the head, but there is a bit of bolt remnants on them, as well as a tiny 1/8" inch remainder of the easy out. Ran out of time at 9:15pm last night.

Today, waiting for my neighbor who knows how to use the torch to get off work. I'm a decent mechanic, but I've made more mistakes on this job (not knowingly until after the fact) than I have in the last 8 years of working on my own stuff, and the stuff of others. This makes me terified to touch another thing on the truck until someone who knows how to use the torch comes over. Once that bolt hole is clean, I'm good to go finishing up the project which should only take 30-45 minutes at that time to mount the new manifold.

I'm really freaking out that that hole isn't going to be fixed, and I'm going to have to pull the head off to have it re machined. Someone suggested boring through the cast iron, and using a heli coil. I tried that about ten years ago with a spark plug, and had a horrible result.



Any advice is welcome.

 

Of you have a welder you could try welding a nut on it and spinning it out, soak it in some pb and thread it out slow.

 

Thanks man. I wish I would have done that to start with, but at this point, there is too little of the bolt left on the edge to do that with.

 

You could always re drill it and re tap the hole, actually thats probably the only thing you could do.

 

I'm hoping that I can get the easy out pulled with a cutting torch, then use a drill bit to get a bit more of the old bolt out. After that, I want to run a tap of the same size that the threads are now in there to clean it out. At that point, I'm hoping that there will be little enough of the old bolt to come out easily, and I can reuse the original threads in the block.

 

Drilled, then tapped. Finished. Was able to tap the hole with the original style threads, and it worked.