Nut Splitter

If you have faced a seized nut before at work you already know sometimes they can be a pain to remove. Imagine using every technique that you know but the nut still won't move. Now depending on the situation, you might be able to use a tool called nut splitter. Today there are many variants of these nut splitters available, this is a very simple design that is suited for a DIY project and wouldn't break any banks.

You will need a really big nut as the jaw of the nut splitter, the bigger the nut, the bigger nut it can crack. Let me give a clue, a metric size M24 nut can accept up to M8 size nut, so keep that in mind. If you pick a small nut for this project at the end it won't be that useful.

First, you need to drill a hole on one side of the big nut. the size of this hole is relative to the bolt you have chosen for this project. Again to give you a clue I did select an M24 nut and an M10 bolt so I drilled a 10mm hole on the M24 nut.

Because the bolt is going to rotate while it is pressing the jammed nut it can't be attached to the blade. So I drilled a hole on the bottom of this bolt this way the blade can be pushed by the bolt but it won't be able to rotate with the. the size of this hole depends on the blade size, for me it was 6mm.

I decided to use a dull HSS bit as a blade. Because HSS is harder than steel it can easily crack steel nuts. I sharpened the bit with an angle grinder and shortened its length.

The M10 bolt needs a matching thread piece to grab on. That's why I welded an M10 nut exactly over the hole. To be honest, I could just tap that hole but this solution is easier and the threads are more reliable.

So I did separate the blade and bolts from each other, but that won't guarantee whether the blade will rotate with the bolt or not. So I split a washer in half and welded it to the blade. Now every time the blade wants to rotate, this wing shape piece will prevent it.

As you see, the test went fine and did crack an M6 size nut easily. But if I had one regret is to go bigger on the big nut because the usage for this size is rather limited.

I hope you enjoyed this Instructable; you can also check the video tutorial of this project by clicking on the video which is located at the top of this page. Please feel free to ask any questions in the comment section below and also you can check my YouTube channel for more projects like this.