just unscrewed the spare wheel bracket off the front of the van and i've got 4 of these to remove from the holes where the badge goes: http://www.prifast.co.uk/jacknut.htm - has anyone removed these before? i guess i'll need to drill them out or does anyone know of a better way to minimise collateral damage? any advice welcome.
Never done this before, but you could try putting a screw in it and tapping the head of the screw. This should stretch the legs of the jack screw, allowing you to just pull it out. Don't hit it too hard or you could dent your body work! Disclaimer: I can be in no way Responsible for people taking my advice!
careful hitting the front as it may dent ....can you not drill slowly with a steel drill bit with the correct bit size at certain points then pull em out and weld in nice lil smiley pieces....
i reckon drilling would be the only option - i think trying to tap the thread back would damage the panel and even then i don't reckon you could get it back far enough to straighten the "arms" that had been compressed good enough to draw it back out.
linnishing disk in a grinder... take the heads off them, then they will pop through the panel.. And they're called riv-nuts
like the idea of drilling the front ring, with a larger drill bit, to remove enough metal to collapse the ring and push it through - that way you don't need to remove the front ring completely and you don't run the risk of making the hole on the panel bigger if you drilled straight in.
These are not rivnuts, which have solid tube like sides and are more difficult to remove. These are called Screw Anchors and the idea of removing the front front ring is right, I've done it lots of times. The rest is flimsy and just pushes through and no risk of damaging anything behind
just done it and it took about 20 mins to remove the first one and about 5 mins for each one thereafter - quite straight forward. first i drilled the outer ring (the bit you can see on the outside) with a large drill bit (in this case 9.5mm) to get the outer ring spinning on the part of the body which is gripping it from the inside. the purpose of this is to loosen the outer ring so there is a very small gap between the outer ring and the panel. next i got some tin snips and carefully cut the outring off - when you make a couple of cuts the ring will come off easily. you'll need to do this in several cuts/pieces and doing it this way there's no damage to the panel. once the outer ring is off it's a straight forward job to push or cut off the gripping bits on the main body (which is in the hole) and push whats left through the hole which then drops down behind where the kick boards are. that's it, quite straight forward and if done with care zero damage. thanks all for the advice.
