I was working on a car from the early 2000’s, and here in New York, that means it’s very rusty. I was replacing parking brake cables, and found that they ran above one of the exhaust heat shields. To remove that heat shield, I needed to remove a bolt, and so far I’d been pretty lucky with bolts coming out, but my luck ran out and I just rounded off the head of the bolt.

After trying to use sockets designed to remove rounded off bolts with no success, the tech next to me suggested welding a nut onto the rounded off bolt to give a good place for the socket to grip.

It only took a quick minute for him to weld it on, and with it still hot from the welding, I was able to remove the bolt with no problems. Even with the head of the rounded off bolt being rusty, for something like this it didn’t matter too much how clean the metal was.

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-Dan