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I've been driving GM diesels for thirty-one years. Last March a Chevy dealer quoted me $2,800 to reach three bolts I should be able to reach myself. If you run an LML Duramax, you already know which three bolts I'm talking about. My name is Mike. I'm forty-nine. I run a hot shot operation out of Springfield, Missouri — one truck, one trailer, oversized loads for construction outfits across the lower forty-eight. The truck is a 2013 Sierra 3500 HRD dually with the LML Duramax. Onyx Black. 218,000 miles on the odometer and not a single moment of complaint from the motor. The trailer is a 40-foot gooseneck that's been to Texas and back more times than I can count. My dad ran a Cummins-powered Peterbilt for thirty-eight years. I sat in the passenger seat from the time I was six until I was sixteen, every summer, helping him deliver feed across three states. He died in 2008. The Pete went to auction the next month. I kept the keychain. Three keys still on it. One of them goes to a truck that doesn't exist anymore. My wife Becky tried to take it off the ring twice in the first year. She doesn't try anymore. My shop is a pole barn in the back of the lot behind the house. Concrete floor. Gas heat I rarely turn on. Two service jacks. A workbench that was my dad's. Saturday mornings I'm out there at six. Coffee on the bench. AM radio on low. The roll-up door open whatever the weather. Becky stopped asking when I'd be in for lunch a long time ago. She just sets a plate in the kitchen and goes about her day. The LML is a good motor. I've put 218,000 miles on this truck and it still pulls like it's new. But there is one system on the LML that every owner eventually has to deal with. And when you deal with it, you're going to meet the worst three bolts in any engine bay GM has ever shipped. The EGR cooler bolts. Specifically the two bracket bolts on the back, near the firewall. If you've ever pulled a P24C4 or had your bypass valve start sticking, you know. The EGR sits in a pocket behind the turbo with coolant lines crossing in front, the heat shield wrapped around it, and the firewall right behind. Five of the seven bolts come out without much trouble. The last two — the ones on the back bracket — sit in a gap so tight that the forums tell you to lift the cab. You don't have to lift the cab. But you need a tool that doesn't flex when you load it. And every tool I owned flexed. Three-eighths flex-head ratchet. Folded at thirty-five foot-pounds. The bolt needed sixty. Wobble extension on a deep socket. The socket walked off the head every time I leaned on the ratchet. You can feel it rock. You know it's going to round the hex before it breaks loose. You do it anyway because there's nothing else. Universal joint on a long extension. Deflected sideways the moment I loaded it. The socket went where the universal wanted, which was anywhere except on the bolt. Stubby ratchet. Eight degrees of swing. Eight degrees on a bolt that's been heat-cycled for eight years is not a thing. A "tight space adapter" I bought off Amazon at midnight after the third weekend of trying. Twenty-four dollars. Wobbled like a paper fan. Rounded the bolt I tried it on. There's a line of these in the bottom drawer of my chest. Twenty-four here, thirty-eight there, a Gearwrench swivel for forty-four. Combined: probably a hundred and forty dollars of tools that all promised they wouldn't deflect under torque and all of them did. That's how I rounded the first bracket bolt. I sat down on the shop floor. Not because I planned to. Because that's where I ended up. I called the dealer Monday morning. Not because I wanted to pay them. Because I wanted to know the number. The service writer put me on hold, came back, and quoted me $2,800. Eight hours of labor at $145 an hour, plus the part. For a valve. The same valve I had on the bench in front of me. He asked if I wanted to schedule. I told him I'd call back. I sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and looked at the keychain on the table. Becky walked through, looked at the chair I was in, and said, "You're not paying that, are you." I told her no. She said, "Okay," and went out to the garden. Six weeks later I drove the Sierra to Louisville for the Mid-America Trucking Show. Not for the rigs. I go every year for the parts swap. The parking lot at MATS is half its own truck show — guys sleep in their bunks, work on their rigs, swap stories that get bigger by the third beer. I've been going for fourteen years. Truck parked next to me was an '04 Peterbilt 379 with a Cummins ISX. Owner was underneath fixing a fuel line that was weeping at the fitting. I walked over and asked if he needed a hand. He said pass me the wrench off the bumper. We got the line replaced. He stood up and stuck out a hand. Earl. From Mountain Home, Arkansas. Sixty-seven years old. Thirty years at a Peterbilt dealership before he went owner-operator. Knuckles like topographical maps. We sat on the back of his trailer and ate barbecue. I told him about the EGR cooler. The bracket bolts. The dealer quote. The shop floor. Earl listened and didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "You ever try a chain-drive bar?" I said I didn't know what that was. He went up into his bunk and came back with an orange metal bar. About fifteen inches long. Solid steel. Square drives on both ends. It looked like every offset bar I've ever bought and been disappointed by. I told him so. Earl said, "Press on it." I pressed on the square drive. Inside the bar, something moved. Not flex. Not wobble. A chain. An internal roller chain that transfers torque through the offset angle without deflecting. The outside of the bar stays rigid. The chain inside does the work. There's no joint to fold. No coupling to flex. Nothing to walk off a bolt head when you load it. Earl said, "My truck's a Cummins. But the guy three rows over runs an LML. Let's go." We walked over. Earl knew the guy — name was Tony, ran a hauling outfit out of Lexington. Tony popped his hood, found a back-bracket bolt on his EGR he'd been avoiding for two months. Earl slid the BoltHero into the gap between the heat shield and the coolant line. Socket seated on the bolt flush. No rock. He put a ratchet on the other end and pulled. The bolt broke free on the first pull. Tony said something I won't print. Earl just nodded the way old wrenches nod when they've already been through what you're about to learn. I ordered one that night sitting in the cab of my Sierra in the MATS parking lot. www.getbolthero.com. Sixty-nine dollars. Earl said order direct — there are knockoffs on Amazon that look the same but don't have the chain drive inside, just a hollow bar that flexes the same as everything else in my drawer. The chain drive is the only reason this tool does what every other tool in this category promises and doesn't deliver. I got home Tuesday. Did the EGR job Saturday. Five bolts out of the front, two bolts out of the back. Both back bolts on the first pull. Eight years of heat cycles. First pull both times. I've used the BoltHero seventeen times since April. The other LML bolts I'd been avoiding. A friend's L5P that he was scared to touch because of the same bolts. The starter bolt buried behind the exhaust on a guy's Silverado in my church parking lot. A turbo drain bolt on a buddy's Ford. Every bolt on the first pull. The dealer wanted twenty-eight hundred dollars. The tool cost sixty-nine. The math isn't complicated. The math was never the hard part. The hard part was finding a guy at a truck show in Louisville who didn't lie about what his tool could do. Becky asked me last Saturday if I'd be done early. I told her no. I was starting another job. She set the plate down and went out to the garden. The keychain still has three keys on it. One of them still goes to a truck that doesn't exist anymore. The orange bar sits on top of the chest. Where I can reach it. If you run an LML, an L5P, an LBZ, or anything else GM has built since 2001 — you already know the bolts I'm talking about. The bracket bolts on the EGR. The injector hold-downs buried under the valve cover. The starter bolts behind the exhaust. The up-pipe bolts to the turbo. You don't have to sit on the shop floor about it. www.getbolthero.com Sixty-nine dollars. Order direct.