Solved... 4F top arm bolt removal

[audikid]

My son replacing my front shocks and springs.
He has sheared the top wishbone bolt clamping the ball joints.
Is this a standard bolt and what size as I have odd bits in my garage.

thanks

[Crasher]

On a 98>04 4B the bolt is M10x100x1.5 10.9 tensile. There is a special tool for getting the bolts out but it is ****, the best way is to heat the upper cast iron neck around the ball joints until the bolt can be hammered out BUT that does destroy the ball joints although new upper arms are cheap. If it had the later aluminium uprights as on your 4F, these are a sketch as heating the ally can make it crack and you can be into £1k of parts per side to put it right.







Drift stages



if the new dampers have fixed lower spring plates, the damper pre instal alignment is vital



the 8E type with alloy uprights was one thing



but later on the 8K type they turned the bolt around and made it impossible and there are no tools to help BUT thankfully they turned the inner mounts bolts around giving you a way out of cracking the alloy

[audikid]

Thanks
It looks like I may have to renew the upright. Despite heating with a plumbers gas gun and WD40, with a 4lb flogger against the ball joint area and using a 2lb hammer to hit the bolt out.
It just wont budge.

[Crasher]

Normal, it is the cast iron upright so get some proper heat in there, I now use a 2Kw induction heater instead of the old gasaxe.

[Hannu5]

This may help you, a friend with the same problem brought the upright round to me to see if we could together get it removed.

Up to that point it'd been heated, partly drilled out, and had a hardened punch snapped off down inside the hole!!!

It wouldn't move at all with hammering, absolutely solid like it was part of the structure.

We'd all but given up, but tried it with a SDS hammer drill with rotary stop (just hammering) using an old drill shank with tungsten tip removed and ground flat, just positioned it on a block of hardwood and rattled it continuously. After about ten minutes (mostly deaf at this point as it makes a helluva racket) it started to show signs of movement, dust and corrosion coming out of joint etc. Once past that it freed up and withdrew.

We didn't think we were going to get it, but that hammering is so insistent, saves you clobbering your knuckles with a lump hammer too, a good attribute

[Crasher]

We use an air chisel with a pointed drift to do the same thing.

[audikid]

OK,

Update. Had to cut the top arms to remove the knuckle. Using brute force of all suggestions above, no joy in removal.

A chap in a local garage got it out fairly easy, he managed to weld a stub to the siezed broken bolt. Attached a welding set to heat the bolt to release the corrosion and poured red diesel to cool it and soak over night. Next day used a drift and knocked the bolt out.

[audikid]

Could a Mod please mark this as 'Solved' and move the thread to the 'C6' section as it is a C6 (2010)

thanks

[dan2485]

if the new dampers have fixed lower spring plates, the damper pre instal alignment is vital

Hi Crasher,

Can you confirm the angle, is it 11 degrees +/-2 degrees? as i have seen a TB for this but that was for a A4.

[Crasher]

Which car?