I am trying to change the blades on my lawnmower. I have one of the two bolts loosened but the other will not budge. I have tried WD 40 and silicone spray. I have used a ratchet set, a power crip pliers, nothing seems to work, any tricks to remove this nasty thing. Thanks in advance.
Buy, rent or borrow an impact wrench and the right sized impact wrench socket.
Preferably an air driven model, the smaller electric ones tend to either be wimpy or they start smoking at too young an age.
Jeff
It's a reverse thread.
Pull the spark plug wire and prevent accidental starting.
Put a "cheater bar" on the ratchet handle or an adjustable wrench on the nut.
-- Oren
"I don't have anything against work. I just figure, why deprive somebody who really loves it."
really loves it."
Also try a real penetrating oil like Kroil or PB Blaster. WD-40 is not that great as a penetrating oil, claims printed on the can to the contrary.
nate
Sometimes an impact wrench will chatter along to no avail, and a breaker bar will just round the nut. If this happens, and you have the space to work it, use a disc grinder. By the time you're halfway through the nut, it will probably spin off on its own.
Heat the fastener til it's just starting to glow red, then use the impact driver. If you've oxy-acetylene, if all else fails, just burn it off. Not likely, in my experience. At worst, a few cycles of heat/impact.
Need I mention that you should drain the tank, and keep extinguisher(s) handy?
J
If the blades rotate in opposite directions one of them will use a left hand thread bolt.
Nut breaker and replace the thing.
Just exactly how do you use a nut breaker on a bolt?
Heat may work. OA torch, or small propane torch. Get a Vise Grip on there first, set really tight. Remove Vise Grip, and heat until you think it will let loose. Put Vise Grip on and say a little prayer.
Other than that, if it is configured right, you could grind the bolt head off flush, and have enough of the shaft sticking out once you pull the blade off. But you'd want to make damn sure first that you're going to have enough bolt shaft left to stick out and get ahold of with a Vise Grip or similar tool.
Steve
Heat will make the bolt expand and just get tighter.
If he can't get the bolt off using the head, why should he be able to get it off with vise grips on the shaft?
When I have had this problem I hit a breaker bar with a sledge hammer. It worked, but may have taken a toll. The part the bolt went into fractured one day while I was mowing the lawn. Didn't actually do any harm, but I didn't dare use it after that and couldn't justify the price of a replacement part on a 14 year old mower.
Right. Heat will expand the bolt. When it's cherry red, pour cold water on the bolt. It will contract rapidly and you'll be able to remove it with very little pressure then.
"Toller" wrote
Oh, I don't know. I've been welding for 31 years now, and I have seen it work many times to get a bolt out when nothing else will. In some cases, it melts the seizant used when the bolt was installed.
Because maybe the head is the part seized onto the shaft. Once the nut portion is ground off, heating, twisting, and a little punching should get the blade off, and allow one to get to the threads, which is the part holding it all in there. And the shaft of the bolt, which is an ideal place to apply torque.
Or, as you suggest, one could just take a sledge hammer to it............
Steve
Conment to the above: The reason heat works is because the thermal expansion distupts the bonds if corrosion between the mating threads.
You do not need to quench the heated bolt with water, and you probably do not need to heat the bolt to a cherry red. You are not heat treating here all you are doing is disrupting the corrosive bonds.
And whack the Vise Grip with a hammer. I've never been able to damage a Vise Grip and they're not that expensive anyhow. And the shock of the hammer is like an impact wrench but cheaper.
It seems that way in theory, but it works in practice. I had an AC bracket on my '67 Pontiac Catalina with the 400 c.i. V-8 and since it was a convertible and the AC was broken, and I couldn't remove the sparkplug from the #1 cylinder, I decided to take the AC compressor bracket out. I had cheap 3/8" socket wrenches and with my hands and maybe a cheater bar actually super-torqued the 6" extension so that the top was turning and the bottom wasn't moving at all.
Got another extension, ran the engine for 10 or 15 minutes and got the bolt off with upper moderate to great effort.
Used a propane torch to heat up my motorcycle crankcase, and got out all the bolts that I couldn't otherwise. Had stripped the head of the first one. (They hadn't been turned since 1967, iirc.) I didn't heat the bolt heads, but went around to the side of the case, sometimes several inches below the head, and heated that.
I agree with you here.
Maybe a lighter hammer. You just want to knock the guy out, not break his skull.
Hold it upside down, d'uh.
(Just kidding....)
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