Hi all, A bolt broke from the steel roof construction of my F355 spider. The bolt holds the piston in place in the right upper corner. The remnant of the bolt is in the frame directly against the canvas, so it will not be an easy thing to remove I am afraid. At the same time the potentiometer under the right seat ended it's life. Not a good week for the F355. Did anyone of you encounter the same problem? How did you remove the remnant of the bolt? Here is a picture of the bolt. Thanks. T Image Unavailable, Please Login
Can you get in there Ton and drill/easy out it out? Can you post a pic of where the broken bolt is in the spider top frame?
If the bolt broke off from use, it's likely that it will come out with an easy-out, as Pap suggests. If it broke from torque, while removing it, then the threads are probably bound up to the point where an easy out will be unlikely to work. A reverse drill/extractor bit is a handy thing when drilling a hole in preparation to use an easy out. Sears has these. The reason is, that if you use a regular drill, and the threads of the bolt aren't all chewed up, then sometimes the drill will drive the bold forward, which in this case would be into your top! If you use a reverse drill bit, then some of the time the bit will hook in and spin the bolt right out for you and you get to skip the easy out step. The seat pot isn't hard to fix, and the fix only costs about $3.00 The write up for that can be found here: http://ferrarichat.com/forum/showthread.php?t=288373
One more question. Is there a lock nut on the remaining chunk of the bolt? I'll have a look at mine when I get home.
Hey thanks guys. I will try to fix the potentiometer tomorrow. I didn't realize that it was something that could be fixed. The bolt broke off by use. I found it in the car when I searched for a reason why the roof did not close. The remnant of the bolt is still in the frame in the right upper corner where it is supposed to hold the piston in place. It is not an easy place to drill. The frame is directly pushing against the canvas. I will try to make a picture later.
As Ton's aware this is the 2nd one I've seen where this bolt has sheared from use, probably down to the roof joints not being lubricated regularly. I plan to change the bolts on mine as a precaution.
Ton/Mark, If this is what I think it is (64414900) the original bolt was made from just plain carbon steel. We made a replacement for these out of a much higher strength steel quite a number of years ago - Its buried on our website under the part number: http://www.hillengineering.co.uk/catalog/64414900-p-172.html The OEM part is listed at £51.90 BTW ! Image Unavailable, Please Login
Bravo!! Everything you make is superior to OEM! Thanks for saving the day again mate. If I owned a 355 Spider, I would replace all those bolts with yours before they break. Would save the hassle of pulling the car apart to get a drill in there to drill them and easy out them out. Image Unavailable, Please Login
Hi Paul, I should have looked on your website in the first place. Thanks for sending the link. I ordered two bolts. But first I need to find a way to remove the remnant of the old bolt from the frame. T
My bolts haven't broken yet, but I picked up the Hill Engineering high strength ones from Ricambi. Was it easier to replace with the top up and locked, or with the top pushed back and down just a tad to relieve any tension? Because there's not much room to work, I don't want to remove the old bolt and have difficulty putting the new one in because it shifted a little. Any advise from those who have changed these bolts?
