Removing a brass fitting

Guys,
I have a brass fiting in a steel or cast iron
fitting i need to remove.What is the best way to get this fitting out? i tried a pipe wrench but it just crushed the brass. A easyout didnt do nothing . They are in old house radiators and i dont want to crack them. I know this is a little off topic but it can help if ever needed to remove from a old tractor?
thanks
Harry

If you can get a hacksaw blade inside the fitting & saw through until you are just into the threads, you may be able to use a sharp center punch to turn & collapse the fitting. I've used a metal-cutting blade in a sabre saw to cut down to the thread area if there is room. Use teflon tape or your favorite thread goop when reassembling the fittings.

Drill it out and retap the hole. Ideal would be a drill that is ground left handed so that when you drill it, it loosens and it will unscrew the fitting.

Are these the bleeder taps you're working on? I'm going to guess, since this is on a radiator, that you've got some combination of corrosion and possibly some old pipe dope holding things up on the threads themselves, and the very real possibility of an accretion of scale on the inside that might be acting as a flange to keep you from getting it started.

If there's no other reason not to, I'd put the heat to them to try to break up any chemical adhesion, just like you would a stuck bolt on a tractor. I don't know if brass expands more than the iron or steel with heat, so I don't know whether to recommend trying to remove it while hot or to let it cool. With steel bolts in iron or steel, I've had better success heating bolt heads until they just start to come red, maybe even a little yellow at the edges and then letting the whole thing cool -- the expansion and subsequent shrinking will often break up any rust bonding the threads and they'll come right out, even if they take a wrench the whole way. I'd suggest at least one cycle like that.

If you can prop the radiators so that the threaded hole is vertical, it can also help to squirt a little of your favorite penetrant (after everything has cooled from red but is still hotter than you'd want to touch, so that it can be drawn down into the threads as it cools.

On the chance that the brass expands less than the iron/steel, go one cycle as I've described and there's no improvement, try a second heating, focusing the heat more on the surrounding metal than on the brass. O/A is good for this approach as you need to heat it quickly before too much of the heat transfers to the piece you're trying to get out. If you're a householder, I've found a regular propane torch is usually too cool for this approach, but that Mapp gas (in the yellow bottle) usually works pretty well.

Keep in mind that you're likely dealing with a tapered pipe thread, so somebody my have put the gorilla wrench to it in the first place. If so, good chance it'll come pretty easily if you can just get it to pop.

Thanks Guys,
I knew someone had better ideas than I would come up with. I will try all of them to try to get the fittings out
Harry

Keep in mind that it doesn't take much heat on a radiator to melt the solder that's holding it together. Don't ask me how I know this.

Aha! That would not have occurred to me on an old iron radiator. Good advice and fair warning!

Old cast iron radiators don't have any solder. You can crack them with uneven heating, though.

I didn't read it very close either. I just assumed a tractor radiator, not a house radiator,.. I don't think anything will break them.

take a allen wrench a lil bigger than the hole is and drive it in the brass, makes a big easy out, worked fine for years when the brass fittings would break off on air lines on semi"s..just a idea