As I was completing installation of a new water pump the bolt to the immediate right of the top outlet port (the one that goes into the head) snapped off. I removed the pump and found a stub of the bolt left. Tried vice grips but it wouldn't budge. I then bolted on one of the 6 mm thread nuts that are associated with these bolts, however I have no welding equipment so I couldn't spot weld the two together and hopefully back the remainder of the bolt out of the hole in the block. Instead, I tried to used the bolt as a guide to drill down the center of the bolt with a 5/64 drill and insert a 1/4 screw remover. I was unable to get the bolt dead center and instead ended up on the right side of the thread inside of the bolt. The extractor wouldn't screw in so I went to Sears and bought one of their new bolt extractor sets, also I tried the Elise tap on extractor but it didn't have enough of the remain bolt to grasp, so I began to drill in reverse, attempting now to hit the center of the bolt. Instead the drill portion of the extracting tool kept on tracking and eventually I reduced the bolt's remaining stud to the block surface and tried again with a punch to set it at center. Again more reverse drilling, but when the tool finally caught it just couldn't move the remain bolt out of the hole, but made a great hole to the right side of the original bolt tap.

Now what should I do?

Other than pulling the head and eventually the entire engine block out of the car and sending into a machine shop to be filled, milled, and drilled? I have a metric tap for the bolt and can try to drill out a hole where the original one was using the gasket as a template for the holes location. If I do this will I have enough material left in the head for a retreading, or do I have to go to a larger size bolt say for a 7mm nut or 8 mm nut? Or should I fork over the $40 and buy the helicoil set for the bolt? If so, does anyone know where I can get a helicoil set for less than $40? Also has anyone ever done a helicoli installation??? I've been lucky to remove broken bolts before, except for the first time I tried to do a valve adjustment to my mother's '61 Ford Galaxie (292) when I broke one of the tappet adjustment bolts and couldn't get the old one out by trying vice grips to move it. Instead, an embarassing trip to the Ford dealer resulted in a fix. I was only fourteen at the time, so I racked the episode up to experience and went on, but now I'm fifty-four and I am going to rack this episode up to the early onset of senality! Any suggestions would be greatly appeciated, including, but not limited to geting some really strong pumbler's glue and substituting that for the bolt. Heck if I can get the pump to function for another 100,000 miles the car, which has 189,000 miles on it, should be ready for rings and I can justify pulling the engine and having a machine shop fix the problem ? Or should I just RnR it now and send the whole engine to the machine shop to resolve the problem?