How to Remove a Seized Piston

Sometimes, if you come across a really old engine that hasn’t been maintained and has been sitting for a while, there’s a good chance that it might be seized up and require some persuasiveness to get the pieces apart. In cases like this, you might need a little bit of leverage to make things go your way.

This time, we check out the scene as an old Ford V8 has seized up and one of the pistons just won’t budge. According to the guy who’s trying to work on the engine, no matter what he would do to get the piston free, just about nothing would be able to knock it loose so he went to the Internet in order to find some answers like most of us would and he’s trying one of the solutions out for himself.

With a mixture of automatic transmission fluid and gasoline, he ignited a slow burn atop the piston, heating it up and expanding the metal in such a way that might create enough space to allow the piston to drop out through the bottom. Afterward, he puts the theory to the test to see if he’s able to knock it out of place.

Now, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend trying this one at home because fire is always dangerous to play with and the heat as applied to parts of your engine could expand metal in ways that you don’t want it to be expanded but as a last resort used on an application that isn’t too expensive to replace and that you don’t really care about too much, it could certainly come in handy.