Ad copy

I've been driving a 6.7 Powerstroke since 2014. Last fall a Ford dealer outside Lexington quoted me $2,400 to replace two studs I could see with my own eyes. If you've ever done up-pipes on a 6.7, you already know which two studs I'm talking about. My name is Mike. I'm thirty-nine. I run a one-truck hot shot operation out of London, Kentucky — eastern Kentucky, coal country, about three hours from anywhere except a coal seam. Six days a week I haul construction equipment for outfits across the lower forty-eight. Mini excavators, skid steers, the occasional small dozer. Whatever I can fit on a 40-foot gooseneck and tie down right. The truck is a 2014 Ford F-450 Lariat crew cab dually with the 6.7 Powerstroke. Magnetic gray. 215,000 miles. I bought it new at the Ford store in Hazard with the down payment from the settlement my mother got when my father died in 2013. My father was a coal miner. Forty-one years underground. UMW Local 1473. He died of black lung at fifty-eight, sitting in the recliner in the front room with a cup of coffee that had gone cold while we waited on the ambulance. I was twenty-six. Mom got the settlement. She gave me thirty-five thousand dollars and said, "Buy yourself something that'll work for you the way your dad worked for us." I bought the F-450 in March of 2014. Started running hot shot in May. Twelve years next month. There's a brass UMW Local 1473 belt buckle on a peg above my workbench. My father wore it for thirty years. Mom found it in his dresser the week after the funeral. She handed it to me and said, "He'd want you to wear it." I never have. My wife Tara asked me once if I wanted her to put it in a shadow box frame. I told her no. It's a working buckle. It works by being where I can see it from the lift. My shop is a 40x60 metal building behind the house, about a hundred yards back into the holler. Slab floor I poured myself in 2016 with my brother-in-law. Saturday mornings I'm out there by 5:30 because hot shot trucking means you're gone by Sunday night for a Monday delivery, and Saturday is the only day I get to wrench. Coffee in a thermos Tara bought me when I started running long-haul. AM 740 — Cincinnati Reds spring training games when they're on. Tara's bookkeeping office is in the spare bedroom. She doesn't ask when I'll be in for lunch. She brings out a sandwich around eleven and a fresh coffee around two. The 6.7 is the best diesel Ford has ever built and it'll go four hundred thousand miles if you take care of it. But there is one job that every long-haul 6.7 eventually faces: up-pipes. The pipes that connect the exhaust manifolds to the turbo housing sit between the engine and the firewall in a pocket that's about as hot as anywhere on a diesel motor. The studs that hold them down corrode and seize after about a hundred thousand miles. When you need to replace a leaking up-pipe — which is when, not if — those studs are not coming out clean. There are two studs per up-pipe. The driver-side ones you can reach with patience. The passenger-side studs sit between the firewall, the back of the turbo housing, and the EGR cooler bracket with about half an inch of clearance. The factory service manual tells you to remove the cab. Most shops won't quote it any other way. The few that try lose money on the labor. Last fall my driver-side up-pipe started weeping. I could hear it in the cab when the boost would come on. I parked the truck in the shop on a Friday evening and started in on it Saturday morning thinking I'd be done by Sunday afternoon. I got the up-pipe off the manifold. I got the heat shields off. Then I sat staring at the two passenger-side studs for the rest of the morning. Three-eighths flex-head ratchet — a Snap-on I bought when I was twenty-three working at the Ford parts counter. Folded at thirty-two foot-pounds. The stud needed sixty just to crack it loose. Wobble extension on a deep socket. Walked off the head every time I leaned. Caught it twice. The third time it rounded. Stubby ratchet. Six degrees of swing. The firewall is right there. Six degrees on a stud heat-cycled for eleven years is meaningless. Universal joint on a long extension fed in from the front. Deflected sideways every pull. The socket left the stud every time. A "6.7 up-pipe wrench" I bought off a Powerstroke forum classified for fifty-two bucks from a guy in Tennessee. He swore he'd done his up-pipes with it. Maybe his studs weren't as cooked as mine. Mine wobbled. The stud didn't move. In the bottom drawer of my chest there's a row of these. A Mac flex-head from 2017. A Cornwell swivel adapter. Two Lisle universals. A Husky stubby I bought because the reviews said it would solve this exact problem. It did not solve this exact problem. Combined: maybe two hundred and ninety dollars of tools that all flex when you load them. That's how I rounded the second stud. I sat down on the bumper of the F-450. Looked at the truck. Looked at my father's UMW buckle on the peg across the shop. The shop radio went into a Reds rain delay and I sat through the rain delay too. I called the Ford dealer outside Lexington Monday morning. Service writer quoted me $2,400 in cab labor. I told him I knew the studs were bad. He said the cab pull was the only way to do it right. I told him I'd think about it. I sat in the kitchen with Tara that night and told her I might lose two days of revenue plus the bill. Tara looked at me and said, "What would your dad do." I said dad would figure it out. She said, "Then figure it out." She poured me more coffee and went to put our girls to bed. In August I drove the F-450 down to Dallas for the Great American Truck Show. Trade show for the trucking industry, big draw for fleet drivers and owner-operators. I'd been going for six years — once for the parts swap, once for the seminars, mostly for the parking lot. The serious wrenches park their personal trucks on the back side of the lot and end up working on each other's rigs by Saturday afternoon. There's no schedule for it. I parked the F-450 between an '12 Cummins and a '17 6.7. Spent Friday walking the show. Saturday morning I came back to my truck and there was a man in his sixties trying to lift a steel toolbox out of his bed. His left shoulder wasn't cooperating. I walked over and asked if I could give him a hand. He nodded, said thanks, and we lifted it together onto the tailgate of the truck next to his. His name was Walter. Sixty-four. Retired Ford diesel master tech from Tyler, Texas. Thirty-one years at a single Ford dealership before he opened his own shop in 2008 and ran it until last year. He had a USMC tattoo on his forearm — the eagle, globe and anchor, in the style they did in the late sixties. I said, "Marines?" Walter said, "'67 to '71. Vietnam, two tours." I said, "Thank you for your service." Walter nodded once. Didn't make anything of it. We sat on his tailgate and ate breakfast tacos from a vendor truck. I told him about the up-pipe studs. The rounded second stud. The dealer quote. My father's buckle on the wall. Walter listened. When I was done he said, "You ever try a chain-drive bar?" I said I didn't know what that was. He went to the front seat of his pickup — a '15 F-350 he'd kept clean enough to do surgery on — and pulled out an orange metal bar. About fifteen inches long. Solid steel. Square drives on both ends. He said, "Press on the end." I pressed on the square drive. Inside the bar, something moved. Not flex. A chain. An internal roller chain that transferred torque through the offset angle. The outside of the bar stayed rigid. The chain inside did the work. Walter said, "Boy two rows over has a 6.7 dually with up-pipe issues. Let's go." We walked over. Walter knew the guy — name was Roy, ran a small fleet of car haulers out of Arkansas. Roy popped his hood, found a passenger-side up-pipe stud he'd been avoiding for three months. Walter slid the BoltHero between the firewall and the back of the turbo. Socket seated on the stud flush. No rock. He handed me the ratchet. "Pull, brother," he said. The stud broke loose on the first pull. Eleven years of heat on a 6.7 Powerstroke. First pull. Roy said something I won't print. Walter just nodded the way old Ford guys nod when they've already learned what you're about to learn. We did the second one on Roy's truck — same stud on the other side. Same result. I ordered one that night sitting on the tailgate of my F-450 in the GATS lot drinking a Lone Star Walter's son had brought over. www.getbolthero.com. Sixty-nine dollars. Walter said order direct — there are knockoffs on Amazon that look identical but they don't have the chain drive inside. They're hollow tubes that flex like the two-hundred-ninety dollars of tools in my bottom drawer. I drove home Monday. Did the up-pipes the next Saturday. Both passenger-side studs out on the first pull. The one I'd rounded came out clean with a sharper socket and Walter's trick. I've used the BoltHero twenty-two times since August. Other 6.7 bolts I'd been working around for years. The driver-side EGR cooler bracket bolt that I'd been avoiding because the angle was wrong. A turbo coolant return bolt that nobody could reach. Two glow plug controller bolts on a buddy's '13 6.7 in Manchester. A starter bolt buried behind the down pipe on a friend's 6.4. The dealer wanted twenty-four hundred dollars for cab labor on two studs. The wrench cost sixty-nine. The math is simple. The math has always been simple. The hard part was driving fourteen hours to a parking lot in Dallas to ask a Marine named Walter for help with two studs I'd been avoiding for three months. Tara asked me a few weeks ago if I was going to be home next weekend. I told her no — three-day haul to Pennsylvania. She said, "The truck is away too much." I told her, "It's not the truck. It's the living." My father's UMW buckle is still on the peg. Twenty-six years since he bought it new. Twelve years since he died. Walter and I text each other now. He sent me a photo last month of his grandson on his lap behind the wheel of the '15. The orange bar sits on top of the chest. Where I can reach it. If you run a 6.7, a 6.4, a 7.3, or any 6.0 — you already know the bolts I'm talking about. The up-pipe studs to the turbo. The EGR cooler bracket bolts behind the heat shield. The HPOP bolts under the upper intake. The starter bolts behind the down pipe. You don't have to call the dealer about it. www.getbolthero.com Sixty-nine dollars. Order direct.