KLA Strut tower bar install Stripped bolts! HELP
 

I recently put on a KLA strut tower bar on my 89' Turbo, torqued down to 18lbs in an 'x' fashion and everything was going smooth. The install was simply flawless. I took it for a spin, then came home to retorque the nuts. To my dismay, two nuts on each strut tower, spin freely without moving up or down. I cannot back them off either. The bolt does not spin with the nut. I'm assuming either the bolt or nuts are stripped. What can I do now, and will driving the car like this make it worse or affect the bolts that are OK? TIA!

Driving with those bolts stripped probably won't hurt anything. You can do what I did, or you can simply get new strut top mounting plates...

What I did was drill out the bolts I stripped. All the way through. Get rid of anything in there so you have a clear hole.

Then I got a large bolt with lock washers and all, torqued it down, and it works fine. They seem to be stronger then even what was there from the factory (which IMHO are pretty dinky bolts for such an application).

-Matt

Bolt doesn't spin with the nut?? Hmm...suggests that the bolt is still in place(it's a stud welded to the mount) and the nut is cross-threaded. Email me your phone number and one of us will give you a call back to see if we can help out.

(Sorry for resurrecting an old thread)

This exact thing just happened to me. Installed a KLA strut tower brace and torqued the top mount nuts to 18ft-lbs, only to have several begin spinning freely on the bolts. They don't tighten down or back off the bolt, they just spin freely in place. The bolt does not move with the nut, it remains stationary.

Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi!

Sounds like the threads are boogered up, the loads on the strut bar was too much for them. Hopefully it's the nuts and not the strut plate.

At $1200 each, yes.

I know how it happened. I'm an idiot and retained the washers, which meant that the nuts did not come down onto the bolt enough before they tightened against the strut mount and began stripping. Even with the 18ft-lbs limit on the torque wrench, the nut was only halfway down on the bolt before those initial threads started stripping.

Now how do I get these nuts off without further damaging the bolt... that's the question!

I have a couple old ones if you want to tack in the studs...not the 030 but the $400 kind

Kind offer, thanks Thomas!

To remove the nuts that are spinning in place, what does everyone think about a nut splitter? If there's enough clearance to use it, of course.

Nut splitter or carefully use a Dremel.

Nut splitter it is. Fingers crossed. Thankfully, it only affects 4 of 8 nuts.

Will report back.

Nut splitter got the nut off, but the bolt threads were goobered. Easy enough to chase the threads, but there's so little thread material to begin with that I didn't want to risk it happening again.

Made more sense to remove and replace those pressed in bolts altogether. Problem solved.