I'm a college student with no place to do real work on my car, so I'm paying my friend who has a shop across the street to put my new Centerforce DF Clutch in. I just woke up so I walked over there to see how it was coming along, and he says "You wanna see this? You're not going to like it."

He has the flywheel off, and he shows me the 22 or something bolts that hold the engine together, and proceeds to pull one out. It's the one nearest the heater hose that comes out of the driver's side of the engine. The threads on the bolt are fine, so I guess the threads in the side housing on the other end are stripped. His best solution was to cover the bolt in silicone to hold it in place. He said it was actually bouncing around and hit the flywheel a bit.

There are plenty of other bolts to hold it together, but is this going to cause me any huge problems (needing a motor) in the near future? Thanks.

 

 

Well, the it's either peripheral port or bridge port engines (can't remember which one offhand) have one fewer tension bolt than normal engines. As long as you don't have any leaks, you may be ok for a while, but you may need to look into a rebuild or replace sometime soon.

The engine I mentioned earlier has the bolt missing on the INTAKE side, which really doesn't have much pressue on it at all. Unfortunately, yours broke on the COMPRESSION side of the engine, which, obviously, has a LOT of pressure on it.

Ren

 

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

 

Permatex makes a product that is designed to restore threads. I have not had any experience with it though.

Permatex products are, generally speaking, excellent.

This stuff is called thread restorer or something along that line. It is used after carefully cleaning the threaded hole out. The compound is then put into the hole. The bolt is coated with a release and then the compound and placed into the hole. After a short period of time you can go ahead and torque the bolt.

You will probably need to get a gun cleaning rod and appropriate size bore brush to be able to reach the threads to clean them.

It will be obvious if this works, as the bolt will hold the torque. If it doesn't then this did not work. At any rate, you have nothing to lose here. I would give it a shot. The stuff will cost less than a ten spot. Any decent auto parts store should have it.

You should also measure the bolt and look at the very end of it. there is a possibility that it was overtorqued to begin with and simply broke off.

 

ok, I know this isnt exactly the right way to do things, but it may work. Could you try tapping the hole with a slightly larger tap, and getting a new bolt? One to match the tap threads of course, slightly bigger. That may work.

 

Well, some of those tension bolts go through coolant passages, some dont. IF it doesnt go through a coolant passage(as evidenced by leakage from teh bolt hole), you should be ok. There is NO way to tap that hole back out, it is about 1 foot deep into the engine. You might use that product copandenr described, but it would be hard to clean the other end of that hole out completely.

I still think that with the other surrounding bolts torqued to stock adn in place you wont see a problem, just dont disturb those. Efven when you are disassembling an engine, and have all the bolts out, the housings are usually pretty hard to break apart after being stuck together all those years.