As I was taking my throttle body off to clean it, the bottom left allen bolt stripped. How can I get it off?

 

Remove the upper plenum to get better access to it and remove the bolt with vice-grips.

 

Did that work?
I'm in a similar bind. I have two stripped tb bolts. Tried the vise grips first, but there isn't enough space to get the grips on. Also tried a bolt extractor :/

 

 

They don't strip if you use the correct tool

Telcoman

 

Telco th is Allan's we're talking about here. Aka POS'es.

 

Thanks, Telco!

I bought the car used with the stripped bolts :/ and wasn't the cleanest car when I bought it. Over the course of owning it, I'm trying to do repair everything correctly on the car. When everything works great, it is sooooooo fun and still turns heads. Thankfully, the body was in great shape when I bought it and still is, except for the notoriously poor quality pain on the front bumper and a scratch I put on the trunk.

Anywho, before I started, I noticed the insides of the bolts were dirty so I cleaned them out with a wire brush, a toothpick, and and a bit of degreaser before attempting to remove all of the bolts. If there is dirt or anything in the bolt head, they are likely to strip. I have removed the intake manifold with the tb at this point have ordered a saw to cut a slit into the bolt--thanks, Scorpi0! I'll let you know how it goes. If that doesn't work, I'll just run to the salvage yard and find a replacement intake manifold and tb -- ughh, lol.

 

You could always sacrifice the TB and just hack most of it off with a sawzall or portaband to get better access to the bolts so you can salvage the intake manifold.

Small precisions fasteners like allen/torx and especially the tamper-proof versions of them are one place I make sure to always buy high end tools to remove them. Manufacturing flaws on smaller tools are a much greater issue than on bigger ones, previous owner probably had a shitty set of allens or tried using an SAE that was "pretty close".