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Rear cradle bolts snapped

1K views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  jwilliam 
#1 ·
Just bought bird #6 yesterday. The rear cradle has unattached from the car when the rear bolts snapped that attach it to the unibody rail. Before i chase myself down a rabit hole has anyone replaced them? This is a picture from my 94 because the cradle on the other one is laying on the ground at the moment.
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#2 ·
Did it snap whilst trying to remove it, or did it just snap at complete random? I've never heard of the latter happening before but its a good sign if it did because the bushing sleeve probably wont be siezed to the remainder of the bolt and you should be able to use heat in the captured nut and spin out the remainder with channel locks.

If it snapped while trying to remove it, well, its not fun. There's a general concern about the captured nuts in the unibody breaking away and spinning with the bolt, requiring cutting holes into the frame rails to extract it, but my personal experience was that those were fine, but I couldn't turn the bolts to even get that to happen, they instead siezed to the metal sleeves molded into the IRS bushings which led to me snapping two of the bolts trying to get them out, and I basically had to tear them out of the rubber to then grip the sleeve to spin out the remaining bolt. I managed to salvage the sleeves from the bolts and press them back into the rubber.

If you can't salvage the sleeves, be prepared to replace the IRS bushings, and the options are very costly.

There are probably details I'm forgetting but I covered my experience here. This project started the way yours did, the bolt snapped(because I was planning to replace the rusted brackets eventually, and wanted to see if the bolts would simply budge) and it forced my hand to go all in on fixing it.

 
#3 ·
The lady i bought the car from said that it happened going down her diveway and that it was completly random. The entire bolt is missing out of the sleeve and the car is rust free so im hoping that i can get in there with a drill bit and an easy out to remove whats left. Ill have to borrow the rear bolts out of one of the parts cars i guess.
 
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