i am in the middle of switching the famed intake manifold gasket, and i cannot get the collector to come off because with the throttle body still bolted to the collector it won't drop down enough to clear the mounting studs from the manifold. the bolts holding on the throttle body are hex bolts that take an allen wrench and i've already broken an allen wrench trying to free them up. i've been spraying pb oil on them for a week and tried using an impact screwdriver to, but have had no luck getting any of the four bolts to free up. any advice on how to get these d#@$ things off?

 

I've only had 1 bolt ever that wouldn't come off with an impact driver.....and I had to drill it out. Those bolts tend to have quite a bit of locktite on them, but the impact driver should do it.

 

did you remove the airbox to have the room to swing the hammer too or was there something else that allowed you to have the room... i'm still striking out on this one... is it possible to remove the bracket under the throttle body that it is hitting on? how about dripping like acetone on the hex heads to eat out the loctite? thanks for the advice.

 

What year altima ? Are all the bolts giving you trouble ?

 

They sell metric allen sockets at sears, I used them to remove the throttle body on my altima, you have to hammer them on.
Remove the air filter box, all those big hoses and the battery

 

after about a week of the mental game of choosing between not enough torque to remove the bolt and too much torque to strip the head... i stripped the head on two of the four throttle body bolts, the other two came out. what i did to get the remaining two out is:

i cut a slot in the head of the bolts with a dremel tool so that i could try to use a flat head screwdriver and a wrench. what i didn't know is that i didn't have a screwdriver the same width as the diameter of the bolts, so there was nothing that i could use that wouldn't slip out under torque. so after a little thinking, i went to walmart and bought a 3/4" spade drill bit, the flat kind for wood, and ground the point off of it so that i could use that as a screwdriver with its hex shank in a 1/4" socket wrench. i sheared off the first drill bit that i tried from the amount of force that i put on it, so i ground a new hex shape into it on a grinder, and tried again. i think that the heat of the grinder treated the metal cuz it didn't shear off the second time, and i was able to get both of the remaining two bolts out in a matter of about a minute. its amazing what the right tool will do even if you have to make it first.

thanks for the help