DT175 1978 Posted October 4, 2012 Posted October 4, 2012 Hi all. Me again. I'm working on my old '78 and I'm still really not sure how far I'm going with this whole thing. A part of me hoped to find some easy quick fix to get her back on the road. Now I'm thinking more and more that I might have to go much deeper and do a full restoration or at least much closer to it. The biggest thing that I am intimidated by right now is rusty nuts on the exhaust and cylinder head. I'm afraid I cannot remove them without breaking bolts, and where that would leave me. I am very new to doing all of this type of work - I did have some expience recently with broken bolts when I was working on the seat's mounting brackets. I broke two bolts. I drilled out the centers, and tried to extract them with an "easy out" - I broke that too along with three little itty bitty drill bits. I eventually drilled them out completely and tapped new threads. One came out perfect, without really damaging the original threads and I retapped in the same threads, but the other, the original bolt's threads stayed in there and when I tapped new threads, they're not in the original threads, if that makes sense... there's still metal from the original bolt in the hole. Even though it's tapped to take the same size bolt, and it turns easily by hand in the nice new threads, I worry that it's not right and is likely to fail (maybe I should have gone up one size on the bolt to fix the problem - but it's not a big deal as it's just seat mount bracket and it is solid. I'm worried about having similar problems if / when I attempt to remove the exhaust and cylinder head. If I break those, how screwed am I? ....and even IF I can get the bike running well without removing exhaust or cylinder head, I hate to have them "un-removable" or I'll be in trouble some day when they do need removed for maintenance / repairs. For now I'm thinking I squirt some WD40 at them and scrub at them with a wire brush whenever I'm bored, maybe I'll get some of the rust off and maybe be able to remove them someday? Any advice in this?
Moderator Airhead Posted October 4, 2012 Moderator Posted October 4, 2012 heat is often your friend as well as penetrating fluid, have you got a propane burner? The biggest risk of breakage is the 6mm exhaust studs they really wont take much stress! From years of experience I kinda have a 'feel' for undoing rusted nuts, you should gently work the nut BOTH ways and never apply much force! Eventually you will find they become free for a very small part of the turn...keep working back and forth and this free part will become gradually bigger and bigger. yeah wire brush and PB Blaster is the order of the day at first though
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