Broke a Bolt While Replacing Shocks on Your Truck or SUV Try These Tips

Whoo. Yeah. Whoo. Argh. So there I was, innocent as can be, getting ready to install rear shocks in this vehicle right here. Everything seems like it's gonna be easy but for some reason, things rarely are. I wanna talk about it. Let's get into it. Now under the vehicle, I'll show you what I'm talking about. Right up along here is where my rear shock is on this particular application. You can tell I started removing one of my mounting bolts and it snapped right off. To be honest with you, I already started removing the other side shock but that one completely snapped off both bolts. Great. So what are my options? Let's try a couple things. Now where our rear shocks are supposed to be located, if you were to look, you can tell, it's very close to our fuel tank. So, we need to be extra careful especially if we're gonna be using any type of flame or anything that might make a spark. Now keep in mind, you're not only gonna have a fuel tank that you have to contend with. More than likely you're gonna have some fuel lines that run out and along. You wanna make sure that you don't end up heating anything up near those as well. Let's use some compressed air to make sure there's no fuel vapors in the area. Now before I go ahead and break off this last bolt right here, I wanna just try to apply a little bit of heat. Like I said before, make sure that you got all the fuel vapor away from the area.

Okay. Now that I've got that cherry red, let's grab our socket. All right. So as you saw, trying to heat up around the area where the bolt goes into didn't help break it free. It still ended up snapping my bolt just like all the rest of the shock bolts. So the first thing I'd like to try is to try to drill it and then use an easy out. To drill it, I wanna use something to try to punch right in the center of this. I'll drill a nice hole in the center and then we'll use our easy out to try removing it.

Uh-uh, it's just spinning. Now that's something that's super common to happen with easy outs. You can drill them and you can try to use it but commonly what happens is it ends up just kinda stripping out the end of the easy out right here. So let's try something else. The next thing that you might try to use might be a twisty socket that looks like this. As you can tell, the inside of it just kinda twists around and around. Now something like that can be used if you have a nice stud that comes out of the area, like, maybe the bolt broke and you still get some of it kinda hanging out. On this particular one, as you can tell, I don't have very much hanging out so a socket that looks like this really won't be useful for me. Now the next thing that I'm gonna try to do is just try to take a nut.

I'm gonna go right over this stud right here. If you've got enough threading on it, sometimes you can get them started on, and then what we can do is just try to put a little bead of weld right inside the center there, holding it to the actual broken bolt, and then we can remove it, but before we go ahead and do that, let's go ahead and clean up the area so it's nice and smooth. I've got that cleaned up. I'm gonna take my nut. With that welded, let's try to get it off of there. Okay. So as you can tell, neither of the things we tried so far has worked. We tried heating this up, drilling it and using an easy out. Not so much. Over here, we were gonna try to use a twisty socket but we didn't have enough of a stud to even try. Not that it probably would have worked in this case anyways. After that, we tried cleaning this up, welding on a nut and trying that. Once again, it didn't work. If anything, it actually removed a little bit more of our stud that we had there. Now my last case resort here is I'm just gonna use a piece of threaded rod. I'm gonna clean this up so it's nice and flat and then after that we'll go ahead and weld on the threaded rod and put the shock up. Okay. So now that we have these ground so they're nice and clean and as flush as can be, we're gonna of course take our shock and then we'll take the threaded rod and just try to gauge to see exactly how much of that threaded rod we need.

After you get a decent measurement, go ahead and take note of it and then let's get this to the bench.

Okay. So we've got these welded on. We went ahead and let them cool a little bit. Let's make sure they're sturdy. Remove those nuts. Okay. This looks great. We've got them welded on here. Now let's grab the shock and get it mounted. And now of course, you torque everything to manufacturer specifications. Okay, friends. So we tried to take care of those broken bolts. We tried taking them out. Obviously, for some reason, they just didn't wanna come out. For me personally, I just went ahead and ground them flat so they're flat with the body then I put on some steel threaded rod and then welded it right along there. I made sure I put a nice big weld on there because I want it to be as safe as possible. After that, we just went ahead and put the shock up on there, put on some brand new nuts and it felt great. Now maybe something like this has happened to you and you wanna talk about it. If so, leave it in the comments section below because I always love to hear from you. If you like the video or maybe you learned a little something, go ahead and smash on that like button for me. It'll mean the world. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe, ring the bell. That way there you can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.