RESISTANCE IS FUTILE
I spent much of the earlier part of lockdown working on my 1986 BMW M535i. It was the perfect antidote to the madness going on in the outside world, with so many corroded seized fasteners to be dealt with that for hours at a time I could concentrate on the challenge and simply forget about everything else. It’s a problem that afflicts older – and sometimes not so old – Porsches, too. I’d guess that around a third of the more than 120 how-to stories I’ve put together over the last decade or so have involved at least one seized nut or screw. And all too often dealing with the remains of said nut and/or screw when it has broken while being undone.
There are several ways of minimising the risk. The first and most obvious is to coat any susceptible fixing with some kind of anti-seize paste. A generic copperbased grease is the most popular, and Porsche itself has similar products for certain special applications. But since for some reason it chose not to use it when building its cars in the first place, that tends to put we second, third, fourth and especially fifth owners on the back foot.
Well-fitting tools are an obvious essential – goodquality socket and ring spanners, then. That should help prevent rounding off the bolt heads and/or nuts – and if that does happen I’ve often dug myself out of the poo with a set of reversefluted sockets designed to be forced over the offending items (ie bashed on with a hammer), and which then exert a vice-like grip that can be remarkably effective.
But so-called screw extractors – with a reverse spiral form, and designed to be inserted in a hole drilled in an offending bolt, stud or screw – I have found to be worse than useless. Unless you are particularly lucky they ALWAYS break, usually leaving a hardened steel insert stuck in the hole, and unsurprisingly that simply magnifies the problem.
All that can take quite a lot of physical effort, not to mention hardware, and since prevention is always better than cure I’ve started to look for what you might call more elegant solutions.
Some time ago I sang the praises of Würth’s Rost-off – which works in part by thermally shocking the seized components to penetrate the microscopic gaps between them – and latterly I’ve been using both that and a couple of other products I found on-line.
First, spotted on Amazon, was a can of Aerokroil – £23.50 in April, but now £27 – and then, on Amazon again, two cans of PB Blaster for £18.95. That’s a lot more than you’ll pay for some cheap-and-cheerful penetrating oil from your local motor factor, and even a can of Rost-off is only around £15. And I have no scientific way of proving which of the three works best. Or even if I would be just as well served by the cheapest generic stuff. But they seemed to do the trick – if left long enough to work their liquid magic – and that’s what really matters.
There was one other weapon in my arsenal. Heat. And lots of it, very locally applied. For years I had been struggling with a butane-fired blowtorch that was effective enough once lit, but which had gradually become ever more difficult to coax into life. It was Screwfix that came to the rescue this time, with a Bernzomatic trigger-start brazing torch for £54.99, and an appropriate MAP gas cylinder for £15.99. So far there has been nothing that, perhaps but not necessarily in conjunction with one of those penetrating fluids, it hasn’t eventually ‘persuaded’ to shift.
Easy to light, convenient to hold, and with a flame that can heat even quite large assemblies to cherry red in seconds, it’s an excellent piece of kit. You need to be careful where and how you use it – as with any naked flame, it would be easy to set the entire car alight – and obviously to have an extinguisher on hand, but it’s good to know that when all else fails you can bring out the big guns. It has on several occasions proved its worth in getting the barbecue going, too.