Broken bracket 1988 Chevrolet Silverado 5.7

This truck has an engine accessory bracket mounted to the front of the engine that holds the air pump, the compressor, the power steering pump and the alternator in position. That's a lot to ask of a questionable strength piece of metal so they were always prone to develop cracks. The mounting bolts to engine were also known to loosen and fall out over time. It wasn't unusual to find broken bolts and broken bracket.

This particular bracket had been repaired with a weld at one point but was now broken again just above the weld and a bit higher near one of the bolt holes.

I also had two broken bolts. One at mount hole A and one at mount hole B.

The bolt at hole A (did you think I was gonna say A-hole?) was broken off almost flush but just enough sticking out to get vise grips on it. The bolt at hole B was sticking out a couple inches but neither bolt would budge with the vise grip method. This was the time to use a good penetrating fluid on the threads. Don't get me wrong, I think WD-40 is great stuff and I use it a lot but the best thing I use in a situation like this is KANO Sili Kroil. Spray it on and let it soak. In this case I let it soak overnight. The next morning I was able to get the broken piece out of A with the vise grips. B was still stuck.

Heating didn't seem to be an option because the hole was very close to the intake manifold gasket.

Maybe a stud remover would give me a better grip and be enough to do the trick. With the stud remover and a 1/2 " breaker bar I did indeed get a better grip. Unfortunately that didn't help either.

If you have a full thread stud sticking out sometimes you can thread two nuts onto the stud, jam them together buy turning them against each other and then turn the inside nut to try and back the stud out. This broken bolt didn't have threads the full length though so I took a die and cut threads along the length of the broken bolt.

I had just gotten the threads cut and was searching for 3/8" SAE Coarse nuts when the Snap-on tool truck pulled in. In case this trick didn't work I thought it would be a good idea to see if he had a 3/8" bolt extractor, which he did. Those things can do wonders at times but I didn't have that size in the shop. The extractor though, whether it worked or not would damage my freshly cut threads so I bought the extractor as a next step if the two jammed nuts didn't work.

He also brought in a MSK10 Snap-on stud removal kit. I realized this was the jamming two nuts together idea but on steroids as the tool is designed exactly for that. Perfect timing and not a bad price. The broken bolt came out hard but it did come out. Appears to have been cross-threaded or wrong-threaded.

Now I just need to run a tap into these bolt holes and clean up the threads. The new bracket is here. All downhill now! I hope.

Thanks for reading!

Kenny@ggauto.repair