Having a hard time removing my Y-pipe... the bolts are stripped... I plan on welding new nuts onto the existing nuts, what material are the oem nuts made out of? steel?!


thanks

 

Some grade of steel yeah, spray the bejesus out of it with PB blaster and hit it with a torch to suck the penetrant up into the threads, wait for it to cool a tad then spray it again.

Make sure you aren't using a 12 point socket, if you have any you should probably just throw them in the trash and replace with good 6 point sockets. Every nut/bolt I've EVER stripped was because of a 12pt socket...

 

any idea how the oem bolts are attached to the cats... if I end up cutting off the bolts...

can i use a reverse drill and drill them out... is the head of the bolt stamped onto the cat?

 

on my 06x they're pressed into the cat flange like a wheel stud into a hub. i had to cut the nuts to get my y-pipe out recently. there just wasn't anything left to spray or grab. just a pile of rounded rusted stuff that wouldn't let go. if you cut the nuts off with a cut off wheel you can bang the remnants of the studs out of the cats with a hammer. the flanges got a little tweaked but i could bang mine back straight and the new nut/bolt snugged everything up good.

 

For the record, all the exhaust nuts/studs are M10x1.25

 

so there not threaded on the y-pipe side? you can just bang it out without worrying about thread?

 

Correct, none of the studs are threaded into the flange (seeing as there's no head with which to thread them), so you can just bang away at them.