Keel bolt #3 - Back to square one

Still no electricity in Rosättra. Working in oil lamps light, +3 C, snow is melting and roads are covered with wet ice. Quite miserable weather indeed.
Luckily I have surplus of lamp oil - there is no place one can buy it now, candles and lamp oil is out of all shops in the area!

My friction fixture worked fine.
So fine that I was in high hopes that I will finally extract this damn bolt and move to other jobs.

Well - NOT!
After extracting few more millimetres the bolt broke with big bang… This time inside keel timber so no way now to grab it again for further pulling.

What next?
Having the metal interface so close to timber surface I could punch it for getting a grip with metal drill. And so I did - started drilling again, with metal pipe as a guide. After 1h with 12mm and 14mm drills I moved by 5mm.
Not impressive.

I went down to measure how much metal is still in the hole.

I estimate that remaining bolt is 15cm long, from the top of the yellow tape up till the visible screw hole (keel timber level). All in dead wood.
30h of drilling, if all goes well. Doesn’t sound like lots of fun to me.

What options do I see now?

Continue drilling
Slam the bolt back down into the ballast pocket and cut it with acetylene torch
Sister the bolt with one or two side bolts.

For now I still consider the first option. I will try using smaller drill bit to make it easier for big drills - and hopefully faster. The risk is that if the smaller bit breaks in the bolt then option one is closed.

Option two requires building a new fixture which will guide the pushing rod straight into the hole. Challange here is that I have very little room to sway a heavy-hammer - frames are in the proximity and I don’t want to damage them.

Option three is the one I like the least. That means giving up - not my kind of baby.

Well, we’ll see how it turns out.