87Blackfoxbodi

well I recently bought a Foxbody and this week I discovered my driver side aluminum heads has three bolt holes stripped. two of them that hold down the valve train covers, and one that connects the headers to the heads. I bought hela coils to put in but was wondering if anyways ever had any similar experiences? and could give me some advice.

mjr46

just drill, tap and helicoil it

CitadelBulldogs

ugh don't you hate aluminum??? You're gonna have to re tap it. Sometimes, if you're lucky you can get a tap the same size and fix the crossthreaded threads, and then the bolt MAY bite. but yeah, people need to be more careful with aluminum and stop starting with a ratchet!!!

87Blackfoxbodi

well I got one of three holes helacoiled, but I can get to one with out removing the plenum, and the other one would require taking the heads off. so Im gonna see if I cant just use a longer header bolt and fix the problem temporarily until I have a more convenient time (summer) to take apart my top end.

TrimDrip

be careful with it. If it doesn't have enough thread to grab onto, it will strip it on out easily.

87Blackfoxbodi

well it already stripped to hell for the first bit, I figure I cant really make matter worse, right?

DRAGUL

Break the tap off in the head thats how you can make matters worse

TrimDrip

no, it will have to be heli-coiled anyways to tighten it down as much as the other bolts. it may not hurt to try to stick a stud in there and put a nut on it. If it only will grab a couple of threads, it won't be able to have much torque on it. Still better than leaving it out though.

Venomantidote95

Heli coil, and be done not that hard, simple really u want it to leak or not! when you put the heli coil in after tapping to the correct size, it helps to use some sort of non permanent thread sealer, where the coil dosent back out and sometimes they do!

87Blackfoxbodi

I wish it were just as easy as "helacoil it" but the bolt hole stripped is a header bolt, and it would require me to remove the head completely. Not a huge task, but still a fairly inconvenient one.