I might have pushed my thirst for upgrades a little too far with this one but being the one and only owner of my 2001 Sport, I feel like it deserves attention after 18 years of faithful service. After reading about the heavy duty MORyde hinges, I thought installing these would be a good idea given the condition of the current hinges. There is no sag or squeaks but you can tell the metal is bubbling underneath. I recently upgraded to 31 inch tires so thought this would prevent issues down the road as well.
After picking up a hand impact tool and small torch, I thought I would be ready to take on bolt removal. 2001s use the torx head bolts that I expected to have issues with so I proceeded to heat the first one up as a test and sure enough... it came right off. A little more heat for the second one and same thing. At this point, everything is looking pretty good. A little more heat for the third one and it instantly rounded off completely without budging at all. It had the same feel as the first two so my first thought was that it came out as expected but this was not the case. I pulled out my screw extraction kit, drilled out the head a bit and tried to remove it with the extractor. Not even close. The bolt head is too hard for the extractor to bite into. So I basically put the 2 bolts back in, painted over everything with some touch up paint (looks hideous because some of the paint flaked off from the heat) and pretended nothing had happened.
Now... I am wondering if I should give it another go or just give up altogether or even bring it somewhere. I looked for a different extractor kit and found this from Irwin.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002SRG66/?tag=wranglerorg-20
This looks much better than the kit I currently have but I have never had much luck extracting rounded bolts in general. Should I buy this somewhat pricey kit or just cut my losses and leave everything as is? Will a shop be better equipped to handle this or will they be cursing at the bolts just like me?
Thank you.
After picking up a hand impact tool and small torch, I thought I would be ready to take on bolt removal. 2001s use the torx head bolts that I expected to have issues with so I proceeded to heat the first one up as a test and sure enough... it came right off. A little more heat for the second one and same thing. At this point, everything is looking pretty good. A little more heat for the third one and it instantly rounded off completely without budging at all. It had the same feel as the first two so my first thought was that it came out as expected but this was not the case. I pulled out my screw extraction kit, drilled out the head a bit and tried to remove it with the extractor. Not even close. The bolt head is too hard for the extractor to bite into. So I basically put the 2 bolts back in, painted over everything with some touch up paint (looks hideous because some of the paint flaked off from the heat) and pretended nothing had happened.
Now... I am wondering if I should give it another go or just give up altogether or even bring it somewhere. I looked for a different extractor kit and found this from Irwin.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002SRG66/?tag=wranglerorg-20
This looks much better than the kit I currently have but I have never had much luck extracting rounded bolts in general. Should I buy this somewhat pricey kit or just cut my losses and leave everything as is? Will a shop be better equipped to handle this or will they be cursing at the bolts just like me?
Thank you.
