An Ode to Anti-Seize

Oh lustrous golden-brown ooze

Oh wondrous copper goop,

That plates the parts that mate

Inside this motorcycle,

Especially those that vibrate.

I paint them all

With the brush inside the can

Then put them back together

And see? How well it ran!

I knew I was in trouble when I first put a socket on the exhaust header flange bolt on the front cylinder of the ’99 Sportster that recently showed up in my garage.  One clue was the 92,000 miles showing on the odometer when it arrived.  The other was how it lived in a carport its entire life, and those pipes had never been off.

On an EVO Sportster, the two studs holding each head pipe in place are 5/16” diameter, and every time this bike was ridden to work, rain or shine, those studs would warm up to cylinder head temperature, then cool back down, while the vibrations introduced by the 45-degree V-twin engine rigidly mounted to the frame helped to gall the threads on the studs or the nuts enough to freeze them in place.  So when I put the socket to the first one and loaded the 3/8” Snap-on breaker bar with enough torque to feel the stud begin to flex under the load I was well aware that the force needed to break that nut loose might well exceed the force needed to twist that stud in half, or strip the fine threads at that spot.  That is known as testing to destruction.

In a mess like that, you have several choices, of which I had the good fortune to learn about by way of working for some 25 years with Bob Bentler, one of the true metal magicians, in the Machine Shop at the City of Seattle.  Bob raced in the SCCA Class C Sports Car leagues, and owns several Lotus cars, including a 7 and a 23, just for fun.  He taught me how to braze, and silver solder, and how to straighten a drive-shaft with a torch, and how to rebuild engines, and many other things over the years, but, mostly, I learned from him how to take things apart.

The first of the old tricks I learned was a process called “upsetting the metal”.  That involves a precise blow, or series of blows, delivered to exactly the right spot on the frozen fastener at exactly the right angle with exactly the right punch in such a way as to deliver a shock load through the threads, so as to break the rust that had formed as the two metals bound themselves together with oxides of iron formed at the point of contact.  After the initial blow, a generous portion of penetrating oil is a good thing to introduce to the joint.  The smell makes it seem like you’re working again.  GM X-88 is the shit here, though some swear by Kroil, but any light oil works, really, even Hoppe's Gun Oil.  In the case of a nut on a stud, a tap with a bit of hollow tubing or a hole punch along the axis of the stud will sometimes help.  Then you work the socket back and forth, each time hopefully going a little bit farther until you achieve one whole turn, which is usually enough to spin the nut free.

If that doesn’t work, you need heat, or time, or both.  I knew one old guy who, about trying to remove the cylinder block from a 650 Triumph engine that had laid in the grass behind someone’s barn for a few years, told me this one:  “I built a wooden frame that clamped to the cylinder block in such a way as to hold the engine in the air about one inch, with all the base nuts removed and all the weight of the bottom end on those piston rings.  Then I poured about a half-cup of penetrating oil in each bore, and went away.  Every few weeks, I would check on it, and add a little oil if it looked dry, and maybe tap on the top of the pistons with a block of two by two.  Then one day, about six months later, I checked on it and found the crankcase on the floor.  It just took patience, of which I had plenty in this case.”

If you must resort to the hot wrench or the nut breaker, I consider that a failure.  It really depends on the situation.  In the case of the Sportster, I used a propane torch to heat up the nut, then sprayed more oil on it as it cooled, then worked it back and forth with the breaker bar until it finally came loose.  I bet I spent 6 hours on those 4 nuts over two days.  Good thing I didn’t charge myself anything to do it, I couldn’t afford me.

Part of the reason why that Sportster was a good buy for the guy who came and got it was the fact that, as I went through that bike and replaced every bearing in the wheels, swingarm and steering head, I coated every nut and bolt that went back on that bike, other than the ones for which Loctite is called out in the Service Manual, with a good thick coat of Permatex Copper Hi-temp Anti-Seize Lubricant.  As I have learned, that means he can park the thing in his carport and ride it back and forth to work for the next ten years, and those nuts and bolts will stay right where I put them, and still come back off with ease.  That’s the beauty of that stuff.

Both Honda Shadows that I am currently working on exhibit the same neglect brought on by exposure to weather and lack of maintenance that is experienced by all too many motorcycles when they get to the point where their storage cost exceeds their value and they get abandoned to the weeds and the weather.  This is especially true when you have steel cap screws torqued into aluminum castings.  I’m finding every screw is coated with yuck as it comes out, requiring a visit to the wire brush wheel before the application of the anti-seize, and another one is saved for posterity.

So that’s the point of this story.  If you want what you put together to come back apart someday, goop it up!  That stuff works up to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, because of the colloidal copper suspended in the solution, and it works on stainless and high-carbon steel, cast iron, aluminum, Monel (that’s the metal, not the painter), brass, copper, nickel, just about anything you want to spread it on that is not toast.  It’s enough to make a guy wax poetic, or something...   :-{)}