I’ve managed to shear a brake caliper bolt inside my fork leg. A friend has lent me a set of easy out/ screw extractors which have a left hand thread to help drive out the stuck bolt. When drilling the hole do I need a left handed drill bit to aid the extractors thread or can I use either drill bit type?

Any help is appreciated

I don’t know whether there is any such thing as a left handed drill bit but you certainly don’t need one. You just need a hole for the extractor to go in. Good luck, not a job I envy.

Great, thanks.
Now I just need to pluck up the courage to take a drill to my forks and hope it all works. This may end up being a very expensive day for me

There are such things I believe but yeah you don’t need them really.

What you will need though is something like an HSS drill bit for drilling metal, especially if the bolt is steel. Regular wood & masonry bits won’t work. Possibly even a Cobalt steel bit. I had to use one of those on a stainless steel bolt and even then it was tough going to get a bite. Need to apply coolant as you go (can use WD40 etc).

Once there’s enough of a hole then try the extractor. Start with a small hole, then make a little bigger, etc.

It’ll be a lot of fiddling.

(all from recent experience. I had a thread on it somewhere after I snapped one of my pivot bolts 😀 )

p.s. A softer alloy bolt may be much easier, though guess they’re not used on calliper bolts. You may be lucky though and the drilling is enough to collapse the bolt and it just falls out.

find someone with a 2 way pillar drill – theres not alot of margin for error on a fork mount.

and i would always go with a left hand drill bit before i went near it with a bolt extractor – more than half the time the bit will bite and remove it before you get in too far.

i also wouldnt be tempted to use cheap bolt extractor – having had to get stuff spark eroded after other people forcing extractors.

I’ve encountered a few snapped bolts on motorbikes and have never managed to get them out with an ‘easy-out’ extractor. Could be inept usage, but have tried two different sets.

You didn’t say how close to the fork the sheared bolt is, so apologies if this is blindingly obvious, but if there is anything left of the bolt that you could either get some angle iron tacked to it and undo, cut a slot, file the edges or get molegrips onto?

If not, get some quality drill bits, typically I’d use a centre punch but not sure about that on forks… start small bit, lots of lubrication and slow drill speed. As above, a pillar drill would be a real help and sort control, speed and angle for you. You can drill the majority and try to keep the threads intact by getting the rest out with a sharpened engineers punch.

Actually if you are lucky you can sharpen a punch and use small taps to turn the remnant of the bolt out.

Good luck. If it goes mildly wrong there’s always helicoil kits.

Thanks for all your comments. I’m going to look into the pillar drill option as it’s looking a tad sketchy to do without taking out some thread. The bolt has snapped about 4mm into the post mount so there’s no option to get at it with moleys.

Don’t touch it yourself. Use a local small engineering shop.