O RLY?!

I broke an exhaust stud when I was removing the exhaust manifold.  I read up on how to extract the stud and decided I would try it.  I spent a couple days reading about it and talking to people to get myself all psyched up. . . and I failed.   I could not get the remains extracted with an extractor, so the next step was to drill the same size hole and re-tap the threads. The cylinder head is made of aluminum, so it’s relatively soft, and I either drilled to far, or I was slightly off center, because a cooling passage was compromised.  After running the engine for a few minutes, I started losing coolant out of the valve cover.  Not good.

Only fix is to replace the head.  Remanufactured cylinder heads for this engine are fairly common (it was used in the Maximas through the 90s), so it was easy to find a supplier.