I’d been thinking about it for a while and I decided to use one of these to help me
You use them in woodwork to accurately drill into the centre of a hole - there is a spring loaded outer sheath that centres the drill part.
Next problem was that I didn’t have enough clearance to get the drill in there.
If I’d taken the inlet studs out it would have got me some more room but I didn’t really want to start opening that can of worms and I wasn’t certain that it would give me enough room
No worries, I’ve got a right angled drill. That was ok but it’s harder to keep it in line.
However, overall I thought this part went ok.
It left me with this
If you zoom in you can see that the indentation seems to be pretty well centred.
I then started with a 2.5mm drill bit with the aim of gradually getting bigger.
I’d bought a new set of 8% cobalt drill bits especially for the purpose.
The next problem was that as the bit went in the chuck of the drill started to catch on the engine casing forcing the drill up slightly.
I wasn’t fully aware of this until I broke through to the other side
Of you zoom in you can see it’s come out near the bottom.
Balls.
At this stage I think I was on a 4mm bit so I though as I gradually increased in size I could angle it up
I went for a 5mm and managed to snap it off in the hole……
But as I’d already gone through it was easy enough to drift it out from the other side.
At this point I dug out my taps. I’d got some ok ones but also luckily has a set of 3 high quality M8 ones.
I then had to check myself and remembered that for the tap to work the hole needed to be 6.7mm (I think)
So I then went to 5.5 and as I was drilling this through suddenly the stud gave way and unscrewed!!!
This is what it looked like
I was worried that it might have damaged the thread. However the side with the most damage wasn’t screwing into the case - that’s the side that the nut goes onto.
I sent a tap down the hole a few times (luckily the good taps had a quarter inch square shank so this previously made Frankenstein extension fitted nicely.
I wasn’t too concerned if the thread was damaged as I could just run an m8 bolt through it if need be.
However looking at it as carefully as it could, the thread seemed ok
I’d already ordered a replacement stud from design911 but looking at the order they had it down as an exhaust stud so I thought I may have mis-ordered. So I ordered the right part from the OPC.
Incidentally I ordered a load of stuff from design911 and so far I’ve had about 15 emails telling me the stock status of everything I’ve ordered but no indication of when Stuff is going to be sent out. Which is a pain.
As things stand though I’m calling that a win. If I can’t get torque on the stud I’ll put a nut and bolt through it which should give the same holding force. I’m pretty sure the stud will be fine though.
Now I’m going onto cleaning everything up before starting on the head studs and tappets.
I’ve got some degreaser but have just picked up 5 cans of brake cleaner from screwfix (I’ll be off my tits by teatime)