How to Remove Stuck Rusted Frozen Bolt by Heating With a Torch

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Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing or maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20-plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly: that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

You have a stubborn bolt in your car that won't come off and you're thinking okay, if I heat this thing out maybe I can get it, and most of the time you'd be right. Heating up bolts, a lot of times, can help you just go that extra step and get either a tight bolt or something like that unfrozen. What I have right here is a small acetylene torch system that you can buy at a hardware store. I'm going to show you how to use it and the first thing I'll say is there's no substitute for this. This is the instruction manual. Everything I know about this comes from here, so basically, read your instructions, read them carefully and follow them, follow all the precautions. So that's basically step one. Two is safety. I've got two safety items here, one is this rag, sometimes when you're burning something, small flash fires can happen if you, maybe you accidentally hit a puddle of oil or there's some liquid penetrant that you sprayed on there before. This towel can be used to quickly slap the fire and douse it and it's just something small and then obviously, you're always going to want to have a nice properly charged fire extinguisher available.

Have your garage door open so that if you need to either throw out something burning you can throw it outdoors or if you need to escape real quick, you've got a clear escape route. Again, basically what I'm going to be showing you is basically what the instructions tell you to do. To get one of these going and again this is a small system it's not your big industrial system. You just turn the fuel oil on a little bit, you light, get that flame just about to about four inches and you want to make sure that the flame is touching the tip and then you slowly turn on your oxygen and this is going to take a second because you just do it carefully. While you're turning on the oxygen, watch the flame and be very carefully, because there will be a point when you're turning the valve and it will really start changing the flame quickly and if you're not careful you'll blow the flame out. Not a big deal but . . Then, obviously another thing is eye protection, I'm wearing my prescription glasses. When I actually use this under the car I'll wear safety goggles too. I went too quick with the oxygen and it blew the flame right out, time it a lot slower with the oxygen this time.

Another thing is to turn the regulator a little bit and let go of it because sometimes it'll just take a second for the gas to catch up with what you told it to do. There we go. Now there's the oxygen affecting the flame and what you want to pay attention to is your blue flame right in here. There's a good heating flame and if you want a cutting flame you just give it a little more oxygen and that's probably an ideal just above a heating flame, and there's probably a pretty good cutting flame. There's your cutting flame right there and then here's your heating flame for heating up a bolt. This will probably be the flame I use to heat the bolt in the video. Obviously you always want to shut the oxygen off first and then shut it back down really quick and you're done.

Before I turn on the fuel for the torch there's a few things; I've got a break line right here that I don't want to heat up and then my fuel tank and fuel lines are right over here so obviously I don't want to be weaving my torch over in that area at all. Here I'm going to light the torch and just use a little bit of a fuel flame to just kind of pre-burn the area a little bit and make sure there's no leftover penetrant or anything that might just flash into a flame because you don't want anything taking you by surprise when you've got the blue flame going. Here you can see I've got my heating flame going, I've actually had it on the bolt for, I don't know, probably thirty or forty seconds before I started this take and you can see that it's getting red hot and that I have assistant, basically just turning it. We got the bolt to turn some so he's just turning it so I can just hold the torch in one place, that way I don't have to worry about burning anything because I'm just basically holding it in the same place; the heat's not going anywhere except on to the bolt. Now I'll pull off the oxygen, turn off the gas and then get my wrench, I'm using an impact wrench here but quite honestly, the way this thing came apart, hand tools would have been easy enough.

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