I know they say they're not very strong and sometimes they put on a show to look weaker than you, but don't be fooled! They are strong, they just don't want you to know! I'm in the process of removing my air bag system and I did the rears tonight. Did the whole thing in 2.5 hours all on my own. Everything is going *perfectly* I am happy as can be. Then my wife comes home, and bless her heart, offers to help. Pretty cool! So I'm re-attaching the rear passenger side shock absorber -- you know, the 2 half-inch bolts up at the top? This is the very last bolt -- so I hand her the wrench and say "tighten it down as hard as you can"... well.... she did... and it snapped... So now I have most of a bolt snapped off inside the threads at the top of the shock. How in the world do I get it back out!? I assume I will need to remove the panels inside the car? Then thread it right up and out the top? How do you get that rear panel off?
Oh man! I'm laughing and groaning at the same time. Women tend to have a lot of upper body strength, usually part of having boobs, or carrying kids or laundry or groceries or whatever. Hope you get it figured out. I'm sure one of the resident experts will have a tip or two.
Yikes! Do you have an Easy-Out? Can you even get one up in there? Not the best example - but a kit like this: http://www.amazon.com/Pcs-Easy-Out-Screw-Extractors/dp/B000W2950W So you can tap in to the broken bolt and back it out.
Yes... I was about to do my own write up, but saw this: http://www.ehow.com/how_5127433_use-easy-outs.html So, you obviously need an Easy-Out smaller than the broken bolt's diameter... and a metal drill bit slightly smaller than the Easy-Out. Hopefully these are fairly big bolts in there!
Tried a left-hand drill bit, didn't budge it. It was in there real good! Got an extractor into it and it was a pain in my arms, but managed to crank it out. Took about an hour! Thanks for the advice guys
An hour of cranking that is If you include time to go buy the extractor, find a replacement bolt, drill the hole, get the extractor into it, and figure out a way to crank it in such tight quarters... just getting the bolt out totalled about 3 hours (doubled the total project time )
Did you finish the job solo? LOL Glad you got it out! That happened to me once trying to replace leaf springs in my Cherokee... I couldn't get it out, so someone used a torch... Had to pull up all the carpeting in the back to keep it from melting. That was a huge pain!
