Thread: We are moving rooms around... one of those weekends.

In particular my office. I have lots of **** screwed to the wall, so the room that is now the master bedroom has a wall full of wall plugs.

A few months ago I needed to cleanly remove a clutch pilot bearing from a lawnmower, and I bought a cheap set of inside bearing pullers. These are multi-stepped units with an M12 bolt that attaches to a slide hammer with a threaded coupling. On the basis of "if all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail, but if you own a welder any tool is whatever the **** you say it is", I went to Bunnings.

One $3 galv threaded coupler, and a $17 set of vice grips later and I have a plug puller. Actually, it'll pull pretty much anything. Lookout next time I have a dowel pin to remove.

IMG_3546.jpg

I tried pretty hard to get the hammer on-axis with the jaws and that worked out pretty well. I did soak the hex coupler in NaOH overnight to remove as much of the zinc as I could. Still had a bit burn off while welding, but could have been worse. I let the 11 year old loose on the wall while "mum was out", and he did a credible job without too much mess.

Oddly enough I’m pretty impressed with their build quality. Couldn’t really tell the difference between those and the $45 ones next to them on the shelf. I have some very sloppy ones I bought in the Middle East, but they were about $3 at the time.

Most slide hammer adapters I looked at either hooked to or replaced the threaded adjuster at the back of the handle. My experience with vice grips over the years is that rapidly becomes the weak point, so I figured I’d just get closer to the jaws.