I swear I have seen a thread here on it before but can't seem to find it.

Anyways since my driveway is on a huge slope I took my car in to get my brakes flushed for a lapping day this weekend. The tech had one of the bleeder screw heads snap off as he tried to open it. The hex head broke off leaving the rust of the bleeder screw inside the caliper body (the threaded portion). This was on a rear caliper and he also had one feel like it was going to brake on the front so he just snugged it up again and didn't bleed it. The rest of the resevoirs bled just fine.

So... their solution was to take the calipers off the car, take them to a machine shop and have them drilled our and removed there as they were too afraid to hand drill and remove it. Then do the obvious, put a new bleeder screw in and put the caliper back on. According to them it would be a $400 bill all said and done lol.

So does anyone have experiene with this? I'm planning on doing the repair myself. I would probably just leave that caliper on the car and either use one of those "easy outs" for broken/stripped screw heads or magnetize a drill bit and drill a small 4mm hole in the center of the M10 bleeder screw and then use a reverse 5mm tap or drill bit to remove the broken bleeder from the caliper body. Has anyone done this? The guys at the shop were too afraid of not drilling it concentrically and screwing up the caliper body/threads, hence the reason why they wanted to send it to a machine shop. If a machine shop is necessary, I'm sure I could give the calipers to the guys at our machine shop to drill out providing they have the right clamp/vice to hold it.

So in short, am I safe to drill it out or has anyone tried? I'll go buy the new bleeder fittings first so I can tell how deep I can drill before damaging something.

 

So I was just left a voice mail from Nissan... $107 per bleeder screw, that's insane considering you can go buy a generic one for 50 cents. I see they have speed bleeders for our front calipers, but nothing for the rears. Is there any aftermarket bleeder screws or some specs on them available?