Hello, I'm in a bit of a pickle, I was reinstalling the upper intake plenum and I've stripped one of the threads.

How do i fix this? It looks like a threaded insert of some kind in the manifold are these replaceable? Would re-tapping the threads fix it and line up again?

Need advice cheers 🙏

Best advice is to be careful and not stuff it in the first place, because it gets painful after that.

Retapping a badly stripped alluminium thread isn't going to cut it. You can sometimes get away with light damage in a steel fitting if the bolt doesn't have to do too much.

You need to add a helicoil to suit the bolt (m6 probably, maybe m8, measure it up). Basically you drill it out a little further, tap it to suit and insert the helicoil. Once that is all done you bolt it down as normal (it should be as strong as factory, but maybe go a bit easier this time )

I don't think there's an insert in there. Just looks like it because I think they rebate the hole a little for gasket clearance.

Helicoil is the answer, as above.

Okay thanks, How i managed to do this I have no idea.

I'm going to get the local thread doctor to look at it, because I can only fcuk this up further.

Those threads seem fine? Pass a tap to clean them up and use a longer bolt to reach the cleaner threads near the end.

On 31/08/2026 at 9:14 PM, TurboTapin said:

Those threads seem fine? Pass a tap to clean them up and use a longer bolt to reach the cleaner threads near the end.

You can't see the damage in the pic they weren't stripped just damaged the top threads, the thread repair guy never showed up lol. so I just cleaned up the threads with a tap and it worked perfectly.