My car died! Not sure whats up......

[rlaggren]

I've broken a couple of EZ-outs. Both times I got lucky with just tapping them gently on the edge or whatever is accessible with a small cold chisel. The idea is to jar them a little bit in their (not the bolt's) "removal" direction; if they have not been really torqued yet, and you're lucky, they will loosen and you can work them out with a small pair of long nose pliers. I think I also resorted to two small screwdrivers, wiggled in the flutes on opposite sides. As Al said, it's nitty-picky work, all patience and care and no muscle at all. Mine came out in the first hour - I think it should be clear fairly quickly if the EZ-out has loosened up.

I have used these many times and they can work; just don't "bend" them. The thing to remember is to NOT use a wrench or any leverage that you apply from only one single side. Instead put the biggest tap wrench on that you can and make sure that you apply force equally on both handles. I haven't gotten in trouble putting regular wrenches on EZ-outs 1/2" and larger but then maybe I just didn't have a big enough wrench...

Rufus.

[asavage]

As I suspected, that bolt has a 1.0mm thread pitch, which is not nearly as easy to find as the common 1.25mm pitch for the 8mm dia.

McMaster-Carr has 8mm x 1.0 x 20mm in Class 12.9, their number 96144A211, for $10 for a bag of (50). Go to http://www.mcmaster.com/ and paste that number in for details. I suspect that an extra 5mm in length will not be a problem, but if it is a small, hard flat washer could be added under the head (or Dremel off the extra).

Fastenal has the same size in (apparently) single-unit quantities, 0.26 ea.

[atalamark]

Well I finally got somewhere with this bugger. After an exasperating serious of events I finally bought a cold chisel and busted the head off the stripped bolt. Everything came off as it should and I was left facing a belt that was behond gone, not brokent but missing ALOT of teeth and badly deteriorated! Needless to say it must have been in the car for a LONG time!

Anway I got the belt today (the Nissan one) and got as far as getting the tensioner loose, pulling the old belt, and setting the engine at TDC.

Now, these perplexing belt/pulley marks! I've read exhaustivley all the posts I could find on the subject, and consulting the book is a bit confusing on this. The groove in the crank pulley is obvious. On the pump side there is one shaft groove marked AB (also with a white paint splotch by it), and then 3 marks on the outer pulley marke A, B and blank.
Others have said to use the B marking in this situation, but I find when I align the belt mark up with the crank side that it doesn't reach B mark, it ends up being a few teeth short from the white mark. What gives? Seems like such a simple process! Does the belt just need to stretch a little?

Almost there, almost there!

mark

[atalamark]

Well folks, a happy post after all! I spent all of 5 minutes getting the belt marks lined up right and then got the battery out of my Mercedes (the Datsun battery is way dead) and hooked it up.....presto! It literally fired up on the very first shot and idled smooth like a champ! I had to shut the car off right away of course because the whole front end is disconnected, but I had to check before I put it all together!

Now the only downside is that the two hoses that go from the automatic transmission to the radiator ended up spewing out a bunch of tranny fluid on the ground.....no doubt I'm gonna have to top off the tranny fluid once everything is together again!

I'll update as thing progress....

mark

[goglio704]

That is good news. Keep us posted on your progress.

[atalamark]

So in re-reading the posting on this topic I notice talk about the crank damper, which was the part that I was trying to get off by having the one offending bold stripped out......this should be one part, right? I mean the two parts are held together by something (rubber?) and if the seperate, then I need to have it rebuilt? I need to go check, but I'm pretty sure when I finally broke the head off the bolt and pulled the damper off (which wasn't too hard to do) that the two parts weren't tightly held together...........any info? I searched around a bit but wasn't sure about terminology, I mean is the is part also referred to as the harmonic balance? I'm not a novice mechanic here...........!

mark

[kassim503]

yep, thats the harmonic balancer, or crank damper. the last pulley on this assembly is held on by rubber, so if its loose and looks like its gonna seperate, I would have it rebuilt. I have yet to check mine, im curious to see what condition its in.

Is the threaded portion of the bolt holding fast inside the hub?

[asavage]

Mark, you will want to read at least the last half of this thread.

[atalamark]

Well I checked out my damper and it isn't seperating. I didn't try too hard to see if it would, but seems like its okay!

Right now I'm waiting for some bolts to arrive and as soon as that happens I'm gonna take a day and put the car back together, buy a new battery, and see what happens next.....

mark