After reading "how much to expect to pay for a 68 resto" and having no luck freeing the front leaf spring bolts on both sides of my 68 resto piece of junkyard darling, I'm bummed! Any ideas would be noted, tried and reported back on. For the rusted in rear ones... I just off the holders. I am repalcing the frame rails anyhow. On one side of the front I cut the nut off and ground down to the shaft of the bolt. Went to inside and the head of the bolt and tried to "impact" it loose but no go. What to do?

 

Soak it with weasel **** overnight. If that doesn't work, put the smoke wrench on it.

 

Heat!!!!!!!

 

Blue Wrench (plasma cutter)

 

Air hammer or sawzall. The choice is yours, and welcome to the club of rusty leafspring bolts. You are not alone.

 

It's seized, you will need to use a sawzall, I had to both mine out earlier this summer. Those bolts are hard; you'll need plenty of blades. If you changing the rails anyway, it might be easier to take it out with the rail. I would have used a torch if I had one handy. Once you get it off you'll realize like I did, no matter how hard you pounded on that bolt, it wouldn't have come out.

KV

 

Hey Oxnard...Whats with the [AwaitingApproval]. I saw that on your posts over in OT too. Just curious.

Have you become such a volitile member that everything you post needs to be vetted? [&:]

 

Yes, I had the same problem. I cut the head off and tried to bang the crap out of it from the rocker side toward the center. No luck. That force should have removed it. I ended up getting a large cutoff wheel cutting the **** out of it until it was in enough pieces to where it just fell out. (Don't use a large cutoff wheel)

 

The problem is that Ford used a sleeve on the bolt. The sleeve has rusted to the bolt. Cutting head off does no good. The sleeve won't go thru the frame rail. What you need to do is use a cut-off wheel that you can get between the spring and the frame on both side of the spring and cut the ends off so the spring will drop out. The sleeve and bolt have become one and weezle ****, heat, and anything else won't work. You could torch the ends of the bolts off but the rubber bushing in the spring WILL catch fire. Be prepared for lots of black smoke and have a fire extinguisher because burning/flaming rubber is real hard to put out. Trust me on this one!


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When I ran into this sleeve/bolt problem I also cut both sides of each bolt with a sawzall. Hard, hard, hard bolts. Many, many, many sawzall blades.

I mentioned this ordeal to an oldtimer alignment/suspension guy who told me me has always just broken the bolt loose from the sleeve by whacking the end of the bolt with an air hammer. The gentleman said it works every time.
When you put the new stuff together coat the bolts with neversieze(sic) to hopefully prevent this from happening next time.

I have no idea what it means, and I won't hazard a guess, but I do have my suspicions.