I had a set of headers I wanted to send out for high temp ceramic coating. It’s a process that I highly recommend as I coated the exhaust headers on my 330 America over 25 years ago, and they still look like they were done yesterday. Years ago, the only place that offered this service was Jet-Hot, and I had to package the headers, ship them out, and wait for their return. Today, there are shops that offer this process locally, and I have one within a reasonable drive away. Although shipping parts is a normal occurrence in any business, I always prefer hand delivering parts to insure they don’t get lost or damaged when shipped. Some of these parts are irreplaceable, and a little effort on my part can save some future heartache!

Before I could take these headers out for shipping, I had to fix a stripped bolt that used to secure the exhaust shield that covers the header. It looks like someone tried to fix this sheared bolt by attempting to drill it out, but the drill bit walked off the top of the bolt. Luckily, they stopped before making more damage, but left the repair for me to fix!

The attempted repair failed probably because they were using a hand drill, and it is nearly impossible to drill down the center of a sheared bolt without some help. I had a lot better chance succeeding with the header off the car, and a welder to add more material to drill. There were two ways to fix this problem, one was to try and extract the original bolt, or two, weld and cut a new hole and tap new threads. I decided to pick option two since this bolt was not critical in it’s purpose and just needed a decent hole with threads to work.

After grinding away the weld flush with the surface of the hole, I had a nice flat area to center punch a new hole. If I got it in the same position as the original hole, great, but it wasn’t necessary for all this to work.

The next decision was where was I going to mount this header to drill my hole? My Bridgeport would have been the sexiest way to drill an accurate hole, but fixuring it to the bed may have taken longer than mounting it to my drill press. I found my drill press vice was just large enough to hold the header firmly in place, and small enough to allow clearance for the pipes to hang below the table.

I made quick work of drilling a new hole and tapping new M6x1.0 threads in the stanchion. Next, the header goes out for ceramic coating!