I am in the process of changing the steering rack in my '99 V70. The two smaller bolts on the rear of the subframe loosened just fine but the larger one with the rubber buffers won't budge. I have soaked in PB Blast literally all day and still won't move. I have broken a cheap rachet and am terrified of breaking the bolt. Is there a trick to loosening this bolt?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

Keep spraying that sucker every half an hour using a red straw fr prescision. Might need to let it soak overnight.
I've had serious trouble with EGR system nuts, and had to let the pb blaster sit overnight...came off easy after 24 hours. Let it have a bit of time to do its work.
Good luck.
P.S. Cheap ratchets break easily; especially on suspension components, etc.

 

An old timer's thing to do is to tap the head of the bolt you are trying to remove. You can hit it directly with hammer or use 3/8 ratchet extension bar to reach it. You don't have to put a lot of force you just want to shock the bolt and break the corrosion bits. Good luck.

 

I am sorry I bought this Volvo, been a nightmare and nothing is easy. I was rebuilding suspension and everything is so rusted none of the bolts comes out easy. Couldn't get CV axle out of spindle and even taking out spindle to put on 100 ton press wouldn't release axle, so had to replace everything just to replace lower control arm.

Having seen rubber split on wishbone bushings, I decided to replace subframe bushings since front end still felt spongy and would pull to left when braking, not a brake pull, more like a dip and shift, not the steering wheel, very strange. Well, another horror story, after killing myself with trying to get bolt out, impact gun wouldn't touch it, soaked with rust buster, but no way to get penetration as bolt goes into chassis frame, no access to top. Well, put a pipe on breaker bar and snapped the bolt off into chassis.

Took me hours to get rubber busing out, wouldn't budge even with chisel and the jig saw cutting rubber, would not release, and rubber was near impossible to cut, and once center was out, still was frozen to frame. Used a torch in end and even that took over an hour to get out all the rubber and the outer polycast material, hard as a rock. Now for the worse part, impossible to get out broken bolt as it is recessed, and given it was that frozen, even an easy out won't budge it. Any ideas? Was thinking I would just weld on another bolt to chassis and be done with it and put new nut and bushing and lock it down.

Disgusted.

 

That actually sounds like a reasonable plan. If you cut into the location of the nut and remove it, you may do quite a bit of weakening. I think it would be okay to do that from above, but welding a stud on is obviously easier.