Most of you will appreciate this. Yes I'm, a boat idiot.... I admit it.

In installing my folding prop last week, I torqued too hard on a blade-retention screw and snapped off the head, leaving a 6mm diameter stainless headless screw embedded with blue lock-tite in a bronze prop hub. (@#^%$)!

This was going to take a while, so I went home to get my prop puller, came back to the yard and removed the prop hub. Brought it home to work in the basement -- carefully drilled a small hole in the center of the screw to use a screw extractor. Success, then failure: Broke off the high-hardness tool screw extractor inside the hole. (@#^%$)!

This was going to take a while, so I went to Home Depot and bought three 2-packs of Dremel chain saw sharpening stones (3/16" diameter) to grind out the screw extractor. Used 4 stones before I was back to stainless-only, but now with too large a diameter to use a screw extractor.

Nothing left to do but keep drilling, hoping to keep the hole true, then tap new threads.

That took a while, but not too long until it was deep enough and the proper diameter to use the tap.

Inserted the tap and started working -- everything was going fine, and the tap was pretty deep but I left some stainless in the hole and the tap galled on the stainless (@#^%$)! Tried to twist it out, but the high-hardness tool-steel tap snapped off, with much of it embedded inside the hole! (@#^%$)!

Decided I'm done making a mess of things! (I wished DDW was my neighbor.) Best tool is sometimes the credit card, so I called a local machine shop. On the phone I described my saga and the guy said "You're screwed"! I laughed out loud and told him if I wasn't screwed I wouldn't have called him! Then he told me it would have been a lot easier for him if I hadn't have done all that stuff, and I replied "If it was easy I wouldn't need you". So he asked me to bring it down and take a look, and he told me his approach would be to grind out the bronze around the tool-steel tap, and fill in with new bronze done as a weld, then re-tap. Bottom line $200. A fair price if done properly but I had concerns about possible balance issues, or issues from using the wrong bronze alloy (he said all bronze is the same and I know that's not entirely true).

This hub is not without some other wear issues, and it is pink to about 1/4" deep from electrolysis, so I sprung $475 for a new hub and will have the ideal repair. I also figured out a "plan B" for the old hub... an alternate way to set two new screws to retain the blades (while leaving the tap embedded and sealed) -- less than ideal but worth keeping as emergency spare if out cruising.