Vintage BMW Motorcycle Owners

Ok. Looking for anybody who has a good trick for this.

My new-to-me '85 R80 apparently had a previous owner who did not believe in torque wrenches. I'm going to completely rebuild the bike and am just in the tear down phase. All the drain plugs were over torque. Like way, way over. I got lucking with the transmission and final drive, but not the oil drain.

I actually have never had a plug do what this did before. It stripped out on the first go, with only mild force. At any rate, it's good and rounded out. I tried a hex extractor with no luck. Also tried heating the drain pan a bit around the plug, also with no luck. Before I go with the drill and easy-out approach, I thought I might check here to see if any of you have any tricks to share.

Wow! One thing I might look into is to find the next largest Allen wrench that fits the hole...probably would have to look at going SAE. If it was a close fit, possibly some slight machining would help it fit deeper into the hole. Beyond that, I'd probably drop the pan and see what I could do from inside. Certainly from the inside, you could get some penetrant into the threads so they could soak and possibly act as a lubricant.

If you're going to rebuild the bike anyway (and even if you're not)..., Just get a new (used) oil pan. Relatively inexpensive swap and, unless you fix it yourself (I'm a Timesert guy), it will cost the same or less. You could even go the deep sump route if you want to add a little oil capacity. Just one guy's thoughts...

Remove the oil pan and drill through the plug with a bit that fits the Allen wrench hole. Put a short bolt into the hole keeping the head above the plug face. Weld it on the inside and outside then use a wrench to turn it out. Use some moderate heat on the oil pan to expand it if it still seems too tight. There is also a reverse spiral socket type of tool that comes in different sizes. Made to put into a hole and grab-grip the plug to turn it out. Calling a bolt out. Heat is your friend. There are also straight shaft fluted removers for this purpose. The hole is drilled slightly under the fluted shaft size and the shaft is then drove into the hole to grab the plug. More efficient than a regular EZ Out.

Thanks for the advice, folks.

The larger Allen wrench was close to what I found success with.

I wound up using a Torx bit that was barely able to bottom out into the hole and get it broken loose. I wish I was measuring the torque on this as it was rocking the whole lift quite a bit. I would have been happy with that thing holding the handle bars as tight as it was. Bonus was that I did not have to sacrifice the bit as I feared I might.

On to the rest of the teardown...