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Since I've got the bed wood out of the truck, I thought it would be a good time to put in new rear shocks. Should be an easy job, right?
Well, after dozens of soakings with PB Blaster over the past three days, and even a few heat sessions with the torch, I cannot get the nuts off. I've got a few turns on one of them, but they are the old split beam/split hex nuts and they are holding on tight. Right now I'm working on the top side, and of course, one of them is spinning in the hole in the frame. The bottom nuts (axle side) are really rusty and I've taken to soaking them in acetone/ATF mix until I try to put a wrench on them.
Any trick to getting these buggers off, besides gorilla arms and a 3 ft breaker bar?
Since I've got the bed wood out of the truck, I thought it would be a good time to put in new rear shocks. Should be an easy job, right?
Well, after dozens of soakings with PB Blaster over the past three days, and even a few heat sessions with the torch, I cannot get the nuts off. I've got a few turns on one of them, but they are the old split beam/split hex nuts and they are holding on tight. Right now I'm working on the top side, and of course, one of them is spinning in the hole in the frame. The bottom nuts (axle side) are really rusty and I've taken to soaking them in acetone/ATF mix until I try to put a wrench on them.
Any trick to getting these buggers off, besides gorilla arms and a 3 ft breaker bar?
I use gorilla arms and a 2.5 foot breaker bar. It kinda scares me, because all of these types of nuts I have gotten off pretty easily.
This is very strange. No rust and the threads look perfect. Maybe someone put locktite on the stud prior to assembly. But that should have softened with heat?
I unscrewed mine simply with a relatively short wrench - hardly 8 inch in length.
This is very strange. No rust and the threads look perfect. Maybe someone put locktite on the stud prior to assembly. But that should have softened with heat?
I unscrewed mine simply with a relatively short wrench - hardly 8 inch in length.
I treated the hell out of all the nuts with PB Blaster and heat for a few days. I wire brushed all the crud off the nuts and bolt threads as best I could before I even put a wrench on there. Only one snapped. The other three spun off easily with minimal pressure, even the bottom ones, which were in worse shape. I'm going to guess that one nut got rusted really tight on the mount, and my enthusiastic efforts with the breaker bar caused it to snap. It could have been worse - I could have snapped off ALL of them.
If only the thread snapped, grind the end flat, drill, tap and thread for a bolt.
That's actually a good workaround, but the previous owner left me with a box of spare parts, which included a set of brand new shock mounts (which is one reason I wasn't too bummed when I snapped that stud off). They went in without a hitch and the new shocks are mounted up.
06-09-2018, 05:38 PM
