Exhaust bolt removal

If there's one thing that strikes fear in the heart of any FE guy it is the top four bolts on the exhaust of the head. At some point every FE guy has snapped off one of those bolts and absolutely felt your heart dropping your stomach if it's in the car you know the head's getting pulled off God forbid it's in a mustang or a Fairlane cause the engines coming out. So let's skip ahead The bolts are broke you've tried every internet ,video, and  YouTube trick you can find and the broke off flush now what. As we say in the south there's a bunch of ways to skin a cat but I'm going to tell you the way we do bolt removal at our shop. Not everyone has a mill and in a pinch a drill press can work just as well , if all else fails you can drill it with a hand drill. We use a vertical mill because it keeps the bolt straight from the centering drill through the drill bit to the tapping they're all being driven in the same spot. So the next few picture frames I'll walk you through how we do it. 

Step 1: I grind the bolt off flush with the exhaust flange. 

Step 2: using clamping brackets I fix it to the deck 

Step 3: using a centering drill bit I carefully line up and drill a pilot into the old bolt. 

Step 4: The exhaust bolts are 3/8-16 thread and checking the chart the drill bit for this is 5/16. So drilling all the way through it will be the right size hole to begin tapping. 

Step 5: using a starter tap that's tapered from the bottom up to the full diameter that allows it to begin the threads easier. I really like using a tapping fluid rather than traditional oil or WD-40 if you do much work with taps or dies this fluid is well worth having.  

heads are all now tapped and ready to be machined and surfaced and begin the process to bring in these back to their glory days. Interesting note the tap rinse you see in the pictures I made from bar stock when I was in machine shop school 35 years ago it's been through one shop fire and tapped almost every FE I've ever built on the oiling systems Guess I'm just sentimental in my old age I don't like to get rid of stuff Guess that also explains my love for FEs.