I got a call from one of my round track competitors about some stripped threads in a small block Chevy race engine he was assembling. It seems that in the process of installing the heads, he had stripped the threads on 10 of the head bolts. "Can you fix it?" I ended up installing heli-coils in ALL the head bolt holes on both sides of the block, since the holes that weren't stripped were badly damaged. Two questions- - - -why didn't he stop when the first bolt stripped, and just what happened in the first place? It seems he had made a 20-pound error in setting his click-stop torque wrench, and he had a bad habit of working on his race car while suffering from a bad case of Budweiser Fever!
A few months later, he was "testing" the race car on the road in front of his house, broke a piece of steering linkage he had been welding on, and ran the car through his neighbor's bedroom. Nobody was home, but he had to sell the car to pay for the damage he caused! The guy was definitely not the sharpest knife in the drawer!
Jerry
