Stuck buttons?

[TheHatTuba]

Is there a safe way to remove stuck buttons from stems, or is this something for the shop to handle?

[TheHatTuba]

...pliers...

(Thanks, bloke. Love the new lightweight buttons!)

[Roger Lewis]

The best way that I have found is to put the stem of the valve into a self adjustIng chuck of a good drill and then unscrew the button. This way the drill traps the stem and allows you to easily unscrew the button. It shouldn't score the stem of the valve in the process.

Roger

[ghmerrill]

Putting something like this into a drill chuck or a lathe chuck is an effective and safe approach since it provides the best non-marring grip on the item and allows you to exert a lot more force without bending the stem (or whatever you're trying to loosen: stem, button, piston ...). Short of that, however, I have had very good and quick results by clamping the stem in a vise while using soft rubber or plastic jaws. These really grab the stem without harming it and position it in a way that allows you to use two hands on loosening the button (or whatever) without as much danger of bending as when trying to grab with pliers does. I've had cases where my best efforts with pliers didn't budge things at all (... now WHY things were that tight is another question ...), but they came easily apart once I clamped the stem in rubber-padded vise jaws and could use two hands (and a bit of non-slip shelf liner) to turn the cap off. And this is also a very effective method for getting the stem out of a piston in which it is stuck -- where you REALLY don't want to bend either the stem or the piston. PB Blaster may be helpful as well. If you're unfortunate enough to have a case where the button is stuck firmly on the stem AND the stem is stuck firmly in the pistion, the vise-with-rubber-jaws approach can work very well while other approaches are quite tricky/risky. My preferred jaws for doing this sort of thing are quite soft yellow/orange rubbery ones with several types of grooves in them -- but I don't recall where I got them . However, they appear to be identical to the yellow grooved ones with catalog number C-40 on this page: http://www.reidsource.com/PDF/Catalogs/ ... SC_175.pdf.