This is the nature of metal: You can be looking at a problem, sitting right in front of you, simple as can be, and you just can't solve it. That's how it is with metal. Cameron and I were rebuilding the two cylinder two stroke engine in his RD350, and we needed to get the block out of the frame. It was bolted into the frame at several places, and in typical metallic fashion, the bolts had extremely soft heads, and extremely strong threads. The end result is that trying to ratchet the bolts loose just rounds off the heads. This leaves you standing there, looking at a little bolt, and you can't get the damn thing to turn. Not even a degree. You're powerless to effect the reality of this one stupid little piece of metal.
The answer, almost universally, is “buy more tools.“ In the case of the RD350, because Cameron was really a limp wristed fag at heart, I took over the task. I used a Dremel tool with a cutting wheel to slot the bolt head for a phillips driver, then put a lever onto a phillips driver, and popped them all.
This is the same problem that confronted me in getting the busted guage off of my Microreg yesterday. There's a brass 5000 psi guage on the regulator, and it's only nominally squared off for a socket or wrench. A crescent wrench was just rounding it off, and pliers were just scraping on it, so I knew what I had to do: “buy more tools.” I headed to Ace, and took one of my new micro guages, so I could match it to a socket. The guaged tuned out to be 26mm (if I recall), so I bought one of those. Why it was metric, I have no idea, but it was. Of course, I didn't bring my Microreg in, so I had to guess at that one. I guessed it was a 1” guage, and bought a 1” socket. I also brought a ratchet, and a set of SAE wrenches, and a set of metric.
I returned home to find that the guage was not a 1” diameter. At this point, I was no longer feeling fond of the guage, so I decided to drill a hole through it, perpendicular to the guage face, so I could stick a screwdriver in there and torque it loose. That didn't work, all it did was cause the sides of the guage to break loose, leaving the back face of the guage. At that point, my rage was building, so I got out the pliers and went for raw, brute force. After much pain and yelling, I finally got it to budge. From there, it was no problem to remove the remains of the old guage, and ratchet on the new one. All that remains is to replace the fill nipple on the Microreg, and that system will be ready to go.
Speaking of fill nipples, I called Nitroduck, and asked them what I should do. They told me that the Drop Zone II cradle would work with the SS4500. I had a suspicion that was the case, but I wasn't sure. Regardless, I ordered a new set of guages for my SS4500, a bunch of the old 4-40 threaded screws that their stupid cradle uses, two of their new 4500psi fill nipples, and a Scuba fill yoke. When that arrives, I'll be getting closer to everything working.