Broken oil pan bolt, won't extract... what should I do?

[cprovenzo]

Hey everyone, so I’ve been having a real hard time getting my oil pan off because of this one bolt that was broken when I received the car.

As of now, I’ve managed to break my bolt extractor and I’m left with probably having to drill out the entire bolt and re-tap it. I’m wondering if anybody has any advice before I go down that road or if there’s anything I should be aware of. It seems like this bolt is a little different from all the rest, it’s a different size and it’s the only bolt on the oil pan that has threads on both the oil pan and the engine body. So I just want to make sure there isn’t something super special going on here.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[ShocknAwe]

Did the extractor break off in the bolt? Hope not.

Best way would be to somehow weld a small bolt onto it and get it out that way but it looks like it's broken off below the surface, so unless you can pull the pan off over it that probably won't work.

[cprovenzo]

Yup, broke off in the pan, so apparently the only option now is a carbide burr to grind the bolt (with broken extractor) down just enough to where I can separate the pan… then possibly retry extracting the bolt, or welding it out from the engine block….

What’s such a PITA is the downpipe is really in the way…. So I gotta deal with that…. Except those nuts connecting the downpipe to the mid pipes are rusted to hell…

So it’s like one mission just turned into an even bigger mission…😩

[cprovenzo]

So I can't believe how bad I got this wrong...The bolt in the picture actually wasn't broken, it is coming in from the back, so what I was seeing in the picture is actually the tip of the bolt, the head is on the other side of the case. There are actually three that come in that way. When I was trying to extract it I was actually tightening it.... I thought I had the steps all down as I've watched a ton of videos on the job but now I see a lot of people really don't make a point of this.... lesson learned. Hopefully I can get this thing off tomorrow.

[cprovenzo]

Job done!