THIS IS VERY COMMON
Hydrolocking is a common repair for us!
But what is hydrolocking?
This is when you fit a stud, screw or bolt in a casing where too much grease, oil, loctite or sealer has been fitted in the thread first. You screw in whatever – once the fluids have stopped coming out of the threads they start to compress, at a point pressure is building up and sometimes to a point it is so great it pops out the back of the casing. Some are really easy to do as the casing design is so bad. Others like a cylinder stud can pop out a casing inside where the cylinder spigot goes – leading to a big repair.
Here we have a casing blown out, which was hidden by silicone sealer, it didn’t show up with ultra sonic cleaning, or heating and welding – it only showed up when it was bead blasted. What looked like some burnt on stubborn grime just wouldn’t blast away as the beads bounce off the silicone!
So out of the blasting cabinet to have a good look and poke about and get ridden of the silicone to see a hole – arghh just as I thought the job was done!
The thread needed cleaning and tapping out, the area where the hole is needs grinding to bare metal so you can weld it up.
Thats the easy bit – its always the same – the hardest bit is grinding and fettling to make it look standard factory after the bead blasting and aqua blasting is done again!
Thats the trick, do it so good that you can not tell theres a repair!
