big hammer wanted

[hillbilly]

as i was casually tightening the cam caps down on my engine,one of the little barstewls decided to snap off,how the fcuk do you get them out.and to top it all off,it felt like another one was getting tight in the threads.so took it out.now i have three caps ok,and one with only two bolts in,urgent help or advice needed,before i get the biggest hammer i can swing and do the whole thing in.ps the engine is in the frame and in my front room.

[GEZ635]

Could be a head off job by the sounds of it. Is there any part of the bolt showing or as it broken flush with the head?If it is flush it would make sense to take the head off and get it drilled and re-tapped or heli coiled. Plus, it is easier to clean the swarf out when its off the bike. If there is enough showing of the bolt, you may be able to get it out with a little heat and some vice grips but you will still need to remove the cams to do it properly.If you dont have a 6mm tap I would get one and run it down all the threads to be safe. I feel for you as I have had this happen and there is no easy way!
Have you put your exhaust studs in yet? If not I would run a tap down them as well -dont want to break one of those!

[davy thomson]

As Gez said take your head off set it up on a pedestal drill at the right angle don't use a hand drill, start with a small drill and work up to 5mm you should be able to pick out what's left of the bolt then clean with a good tap. ps only use good drills( ie dormer) and do a dummy run first with a larger bolt in a vice to get a feel for the set up.

[RALPHARAMA]

If you have engineering experience you may be able to drill it out in situ, but it's not easy and I doubt you would have snapped it off in the first place if you had the skill level to do it. Unless there are any Zeddist near you comfortable with performing this delicate operation I would whip the head back off and take it to a local engineering shop.

What ever you do DO NOT drill the remaining bolt and use an 'easiout' style stud remover as 99 times out of 100 they break off and then you're facing a much bigger bill to get a man with spark erosion kit involved, and that is pretty specialist kit - even I don't have that

I really wouldn't take any short cuts getting this sorted as this is the sort of problem that can rapidly escalate into a seriously expensive shit.

Before you do any more work on your bike buy a good quality torque wrench or at least borrow one. These M6 bolts should have no more than an absolute maximum 8ft/lb , which isn't a lot.

I'd happily sort it for you but you're a little bit far from my workshop, so unless you travel around the country you best get local help

[hillbilly]

thanks for that advice,but i hadnt even torqued them down yet, it started to get tight in the thread with about 10mm left before it would have started to tighten.so i started to undo it and it snapped clean off about 1mm below the top of the head,its the one were the dowel goes.looking at it it looks like it had been stressed before.there is enough thread left to put a threaded dowel on what broke off,about 10mm,so im looking at any way to get it done right now.