Just yesterday I was in a deep sea of melancholy with my head in my hands after breaking an EZ-Out bolt extractor into a bolt that had broken in my engine block. But then I found a cure, and I’m here to deliver the antidote to you, my fellow wrenchers.

A few weeks ago, I let my redneck side go a little too wild, and blew up my engine in a mud pit. Then I went on Craigslist and bought a used motor for 145 bucks from some random off-roading Jeep-nuts.

For the most part, the new motor looked okay, except for one thing: there was a broken motor mount bolt in the side of the engine block. My arch nemesis, Tavarish, already wrote a story on how to remove broken bolts . So, just follow his advice and Bob’s my uncle, right?

Suck it up Only 2.4 pounds, has a 60w motor for powerful suction, has a lithium battery that can store charge for up to 18 months, which means you can leave it in the car, and it even comes with different heads for different uses as well.

You see, ideally, Freddy’s EZ-Out method would result in something resembling the picture above: the bolt shank spins right out and I’m home free. In fact, I’ve had great success on these same engine mount bolts on another engine. But because this is a Michigan Jeep and everything is coated in rust , and because I am the most impatient wrencher in the history of earth, it didn’t go smoothly at all.

I drilled a hole into the broken bolt, stuck the EZ-Out into the hole, heated the surrounding metal with a torch and gave her a nice, hard crank. It wouldn’t budge. This is where a wise wrencher would take out the EZ-Out and throw it aside, because EZ-outs are notoriously weak. But not I. I turned it a little harder. Still nothing. “Ah screw this,” I thought, “I’m giving her all I’ve got.”

I should have learned from the whole Blown Up Engine incident that “Ah screw this, I’m giving her all I’ve got” is a pretty damn bad idea 99 percent of the time. But since I don’t learn from my mistakes, I cranked the wrench and “SNAP!”

I broke off the EZ-Out.

I tried removing the EZ-Out by breaking it with a punch and hammer (EZ-Outs are very brittle), but no dice. That’s when I realized I was doomed, because drilling through broken EZ-Outs (like the one in the picture above) is borderline impossible, as they are made of extremely-hard steel.

Seeing as I didn’t want to drop $150 on a fancy motor mount bracket that ties into additional holes in my block, I decided to call a few machine shops to see if they could help me. “Sure, I can extract that bolt no problem, bring it on by,” they said. Then I told them: “Just one thing, though. There’s a broken EZ-Out in the bol—hello? Hello? You still there?”

Nobody could help me. Some folks recommended that I try to have a machine shop use their Electrical Discharge Machine (EDM) to burn the bolt out, but that would have required me to tear the engine down to the bare block, and I wasn’t about to do that.

Even the internets told me I was screwed. In the video in Freddy’s story , Eric The Car Guy admits that a broken EZ-Out “is, quite honestly, worst case scenario,” and that it would require a trip to the machine shop.

I was doomed. Or so I thought.

After crying myself to sleep, my friend came over to make sure I wasn’t just gorging myself on ice cream and watching reruns of Seventh Heaven. He had an idea to cheer me up: “Hey Dave, why don’t you grab your Dremel, and we’ll see what we can do.”

We grabbed my dremel (which is worth its weight in gold), a grinding stone bit and a chain saw sharpener bit, and began grinding into the pesky EZ-Out.

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After about nine million years of Dremel-ing, my friend said he felt the dremel break through something. We took the bit out, and inspected. Here’s what we saw:

Success! The Dremel had conquered the unconquerable. We had gone through four bits and lots of time, but that brittle EZ-Out slowly crumbled into dust, and I was home free. Now all I have to do is tap new threads, and I’ll have a fully-functional threaded hole— that’s good, seeing as there are only three bolts holding the engine on that side, so I’ll need all the fastening I can get.

So the takeaway here is that when you break your extractor trying to remove a broken bolt (and I do say “when,” because they break often), you’re not completely screwed. Put down the tub of Neapolitan and grab a Dremel and a twelve pack of beer, maybe crank some Alan Jackson, and patiently let your trusty rotary tool blast the nefarious bolt extractor into smithereens.