Why rust kept me up all night.

Well...the Corvette pictured here wasn't the car my friend and I were working on. This is a whole other self-contained corrosion study in process a few doors down from me!

We were working on another car. A 2005 hatchback from a major manufacturer. Which manufacturer is pretty irrelevant. It's a pretty typical problem. And, this data point could be old news too. Maybe the OEM has solved this rust and design issue by now?

If you've worked on cars...especially the underside of one, you know what you're going to find. Rust. Plenty of rust. Brakes, suspensions, frame and...of course...the exhaust system. That's the place where moisture, high temps, and road salt come together to give mechanics grief. Unending knuckle busting grief. And, this was the case for my friend and me. His flex pipe rusted and fatigued right through. If I had any extra energy, I might have snapped some pictures of the fiasco. But, alas, our energy had been zapped.

Cutting most of the bolts went just fine. The angle grinder did its job. But, in the end, after the obligatory stripped out O2 sensor, we were left with two studs that were rusted solid into the catalytic converter connection flange. Normally these would be clearance holes with nuts on the back side and bolts to hold everything together. But, nope...this company used threaded holes. (The Lean manufacturing team probably got points for saving assembly time and reducing part count.)

All we had to do was drill out what was left. Piece of cake, right?. Upsidedown, under a car, laying in metal chips trying to drill out what must have been the hardest steel on the planet with the world's dullest drill bits. Maybe there was a better way. But...given the tools and time...drilling was the only option in hand. So...with both of us on our backs trying to push horizontally on the drill to get the bit to bite...we worked painstakingly all afternoon to drill these two studs out. (Maybe 6mm of material). I lost count of how many bits snapped off. I know we dulled pretty much every bit I own. But, eventually, with perseverance and surprisingly minimal cursing, we drilled out the metal and bolted everything back together. (yeah!)

And in the night...the muscle pains began in earnest. Just a deep gnawing ache from pushing with just my arms for hours. Literally hours. Which kept me up a good portion of the night. Bring on the ibuprofen! My arms haven't hurt like that since I decided Army conditioning drills at 6:00 in the morning would be a good idea for a college gym class credit.

Now...could this have been prevented? Yes! (I could probably exercise a bit more too which would help.) I'm not saying that automobile manufacturers need to go to crazy lengths to make sure the third owner of a car has an easy time making repairs. But, I'd encourage engineers and project manufacturers to take a long-term view of the cost of ownership for their products. We'll all sleep better with a little less rust in our lives.

-Andy Hessler