Seized bolt - Rohloff thinning oil and acetone miracle solution

[onmybike]

One of the hex bolts attaching my rear Tubus pannier rack to my Nomad's seat stays seized... about 5 years ago. It happened when I was travelling in asia and with my limited tool set I managed to do little more than round out the hex socket in my attempts to undo it. Ever since then replacing the bolt has been one of those projects that I'll get to 'soon'. In the meantime if I had to remove the rack for air transport I simply undid the affected horizontal rail that connected the rack to the seat stay at the rack end and would tape the rail to the seat stay during transport.

With a new tour coming up I decided now was the time to finally solve the problem. I mean how much more seized could a bolt become in 5 years?

First I tried lying the bike on it's side, bolt head down, and filling the opposite side of the braze-on hole with WD-40 and leaving it to 'penetrate' for a day. I didn't hold out much hope as after 24 hours the WD-40 was still pooled in the braze-on, not much sign of any penetration happening. Then I used a hacksaw to cut a screwdriver style slot across the head. No dice. Not enough leverage from a screwdriver and a number of bent and damaged knife blades and steel rules from attempting to use them as 'superwide mega-leverage' screwdriver blades.

Next I filed two parallel flat sides onto the bolt head and repeated the soaking trick, this time with "PB Blaster", another penetrating oil.

Again, no dice, my shifting spanners couldn't budge the damn thing.

At this point I had spent quite a few hours on this fruitless quest and was thinking I'd have to get a local engineer to drill the thing out. But in one last desperate measure, I googled 'seized bolt' and the internet answered - "use a 50/50 mix of acetone and Automatic Transmission Fluid". Great! The only hardware store in 75km sells them both, in two litre and five litre bottles respectively. I need about two drops of each.

Lucky for me the local chemist had a small bottle of pure acetone nail polish remover. For the oil I thought laterally - Rohloff oil!? Well I have some and I vaguely recall a link from this forum to an engineers description of disassembling a Rohloff hub. He said something about short chain polymers in Rohloff oil or something like that and some expert anti-seize guy on youtube prattled on and on about short chain polymers or somesuch in Automatic Transmission Fluid. So I decided to combine all of my half remembered and probably misheard and misunderstood knowledge about oils and use Rohloff thinning oil for the oil component. For a lazy person like myself this is much easier than trying to confirm the facts.

Fifteen minutes of soaking this time... and.... IT WORKED!

[Danneaux]

IT WORKED!

YAY!

A terrific tip, well worth noting.

Thanks so much for sharing it.

All the best,

Dan.

[David Simpson]

What a great story! This is the kind of story that I love, since I can relate to trying to solve a problem like this. I'm glad it you eventually figured it out. And you have also provided us with a new nugget of info: using Rohloff oil as an anti-seize fluid.

So I decided to combine all of my half remembered and probably misheard and misunderstood knowledge ...

I think a lot of the world's great discoveries and inventions started with the word "Oops!".

- DaveS

[John Saxby]

Great story, and a great tip!  I shudder to think of the cost of the inverse, though, using Rohloff oil in a pinch in an automatic transmission...

[mickeg]

GREAT.

Thanks for posting.  But be careful with Acetone, it is a great solvent and can dissolve things you do not want dissolved, like paint.  In my college days I had a part time job in a chemistry research lab where we used Acetone in some of our research.  My coffee cup was plastic and had some coffee staining, I thought Acetone would be a good way to clean out the cup but it started to dissolve the cup.

[onmybike]

But be careful with Acetone, it is a great solvent and can dissolve things you do not want dissolved, like paint.

I figured the file I used to create the flat surfaces on the bolt head had already done a reasonable job of removing the powdercoat so Acetone couldn't do much worse!

However because Acetone evaporates so quickly I wasn't sure once I'd placed the oil/acetone mix into the braze-on depression if the mixture had disappeared because it had penetrated the thread or had simply evaporated. It certainly didn't pool in the depression like the other penetrating oils had - was mostly gone after 15 minutes.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to hear back from anyone else on this forum if they manage to replicate my results. Or, this forum being what it is, to hear back from an actual engineer or industrial chemist pointing out the flaws in my half-remembered and misconstrued understanding of the nature of Rohloff vs. Automatic Transmission Fluid.

BTW, the internet also tells me vegetable oil can be used but I only read that after the fact. And anyway 'Oil of Rohloff' has a cool factor that the humble veg can't compete with.