How does this happen?

So i'm sitting here halfway through the dang PI cam/manifold swap with the following problems...one of the thermostat housing bolts seized on us and snapped in 4 places every time we tried to lube and pull it. Now we've drilled it 4 times and found out basically it's become an actual part of the head. HOW THE heck does a Freakin steel bolt become PART of an aluminum head? Then UPS stopped today to drop of my cam bolts, oh wait, nevermind I guess the guys going to just park in front of my house and then drive away 5 minutes later without dropping anything off...and the 1800 line says "its in route". On top of that, my DD is the 88 bonneville with nonworking windshield wipers and a leaky sunroof that soaks my seat and as of righ tnow its been frickin raining for the past 2 days. I'm extremely pissed off at the moment...now I get to go deal with my co workers at McDonalds for the next 4 hours.

Dan_Soprano said:

watch the profanity brother..........edited for you

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Sorry Dan, the install has been fairly stressful now, its going on its 5th day and still nowhere near completion so it's just taking its toll. It seems like every time I attempt something on this car 400 things have to go TOTALLY wrong and it seems like nobody else has ever experienced the same problems i've had. That plus college/work just finally all added up and took its toll on me today.

bluextc said:

Did UPS ever come back?

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Well I had to work @ 7 and the lady earlier told me to call back before 7 if the package hadn't showed up. On the way to work I called in and told them that i needed the contents of the package so the lady sent a message to the local distribution center about it. I got a call around 745 saying they'd found my package in the warehouse, even though the online tracking said it was "en route" to my house and scheduled to be delivered today. She said we could either come pick it up today or wait til Monday and have it priority'd to our house. I asked if they were open saturdays being as i was at work and it was their mess up and she said sorry they're not open saturday. Long story short my parents rock and went over and got them for me, the bolts are now on the cams and partially torqued down.

Now the only problems we have left are finding a bolt that fell down between the engine/firewall in the tear down, figuring out what to do with the heater hose, and figuring out how we are going to deal with this thermostat housing bolt that decided to become one with the head. When I say that im not joking or exaggerating by any means either, we literally drilled the thing out to 1/4 inch and it still wouldnt pop out with any amnt of tapping on it with a hammer & screwdriver/chisel/other pointed objects. I'm thinking what we'll probably have to end up doing is threading a bolt through it and then using a nut on the bottom to do the actual gripping. Ghetto but it's pretty much the only option other than tapping a new hole which we might not get aligned right with the manifold...we'll have to see. Then I get to find out if the alternator is going to fit. whopeee

And yes deftsound, I do work at McDonalds. I currently am employeed by Honeywell, McDonalds, and am also a 17 credit college student.

DTNODYA said:

I can relate man. I had a bolt snap on me and after I drilled it 10000 times, it also became part of the head. Luckily it was the bolt on the left because the one on the right is basically "in" the head.

What I did was drilled out the hole and tapped it with a standard thread (Because my Stepdad had a bolt that was stainless and the perfect legnth) ... worked perfecly. Threading a hole is not hard just takes time to do it right. I contemplated putting a bolt and nut but decided that was wayyyy too ghetto for me.

To make matters more interesting, I was going to re-thread the hole to the metric size of the factory bolt but went to Ford and asked if they had a bolt in stock ... They told me the bolt was either 16 or 26 bucks (can't exactly remember) but I laughed in the guys face.

Good luck and just keep vaccuming the shavings from drilling!! Oh, and when you do get the bolt situation straightened out, clean the threads on the good bolt (brush em' ya know) and put a nice coat of never-seez on the threads before you put them back in! Very important IMO, especially after my God awful experience ...

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Yeah thats what we're debating right now is how we're going to deal with the bolt. It's funny in a twisted way, but the bolt that snapped on you is the EXACT bolt that snapped on us, right on the thermostat housing, left side thats on the little overhanging thing...weird. We would have to borrow a tap and die set from a coworker so that is really the only drawback. My main goal is to have the car running on Sunday because me and a couple guys are going to go out of town Sunday night and line up again, and I want to see how much of a difference the swap made when i'm up against a 96 GT that beat me by about 4-5 car lengths last time, dang 5spd + 4.30's + plenum + o/r xpipe + 75mmTB...

I guess we'll just have to see, i'm not going to try rush things and screw something up just to get it running but at the same time im really sick of not having the car for these last few precious weeks before winter.