these are called screw extractors but most people know them as easy-outs and these
are used when you get a broken stud or a broken bolt in a hole like that
so here we've got a small shaft and in the end there is a broken bolt and we need
to actually get that out so ideally what you try doing first is drilling that
with a left and a drill bit and you probably will be able to spin that out
but in a lot of cases if you've not got a left handed drill bit if you drill it
out and you still can't get the actual bolt out you have to resort to trying a
set of these you success with these can vary sometimes they work sometimes they
don't if they don't work you have to drill the stud completely out and then
re-tap the hole if they do work fantastic you can often just get away
re-tapping the hole and then you can put a bolt back in there again so the first
thing we need to do is to centre punch the center of the broken bolt on a small
bolt like this it is extremely difficult but we'll do our best
so that's roughly the center so I'm just going to tap it there and that was
actually a little bit high so I'm just going to go a bit lower and we'll just
tap it again and I think that's a little bit close to the center so now we're
going to take a small centre drill and we're going to drill that in the center
so I've now selected a drill bit that is slightly smaller than the screw extractor
that we're going to use so I'm now going to drill that all using that drill bit
and you probably saw that the actual drill bit is bit into it
and it's driven the stud further into this shaft so I'm still going to have to
drill it out and then we will see if we can use the screw extractor on it
so I'm sure that we've drilled in there deep enough now so I've got the screw
extractor I'm going to put it into the hole that we just drilled then
I'm going to tap it in and then if we take a small spanner then apply pressure to it and
turn it in an anti-clockwise direction
you can see that it has actually worked and it has actually extracted the broken
stud
so in a lot of cases you'll do this and it'll be extremely difficult
you'll spend their ages messing about and it won't work anywhere one thing
you've got to be really careful of is breaking the actual screw extractor in
the bolt because if you do that you then in a lot of trouble because these are
actually hardened and you will really struggle then so that's basically how to use a
screw extractor or an easy-out but like I said you will have limited
success by using this method sometimes it'll work sometimes it wont this one
was a particularly easy one and I have used these in the past and they have
worked other times they haven't and I've ended up just drilling the hole
completely out and re-tapping it so the easy out actually works by having a
left-handed thread on it so when you put that in there and tap it and then when
you unscrew it in an anti-clockwise direction they've actually bites in to
the actual stud and that's what enables you to remove it so sometimes they work
sometimes they don't but it's always worth giving it a shot