Who got the bolt out? Who, who, who, who?

Yesterday it was finally time to tackle the stripped out bolt on the engine. our bolt extraction kit had arrived and all our hopes and dreams were placed on it being the solution. The socket did not fit squarely on the bolt which made us nervous because in a lot of the videos we watched the socket is hammered on to the bolt. We didn’t have the space to do any hammering.

Kathy and I puzzled for a while and then I just tried to turn the ratchet. It held. After that it was just a battle of wills – 20 minutes of grunting later the bolt finally gave way. We now have now replaced all our motor mounts.

Special thanks to our boat neighbor Kyle for cutting off the bolt to one of the other mounts. It was stuck and Kyle made the mistake of walking past as we started our drive to Friday Harbor for more tools. He quickly accepted the challenge, and had it cut off in 5 minutes.

Why did he need to remove it, you ask? We had to salvage the brackets. The brackets are custom so we couldn’t get new ones. Kathy worked hard cleaning them up.

We need to wait 48 hours for everything to settle before we can align the shaft so we’re on to other things for now.