A "booger" indeed! I did end up getting them in today.
It dawned on me today that the silver bolts that were in my windshield hinge were not original - the previous owner must have swapped them out to install a cargo rack that was on there. (I got rid of that a while ago) Then I remembered when I bought the Jeep finding a bag of random bolts and screws in the center console. So when I looked in that bag, sure enough there was a fresh set of factory torx bolts that were just the right size for the windshield hinges.
As luck would have it, a buddy at work happened to have his tools in his truck including an impact driver. Between the new bolts and the impact driver - that got r done!
I don't know if those bolts will ever come out though. Anybody want to buy a nice light bar?
I think part of the problem in the first place was that the metal piece inside the windshield frame that the holes go into kept shifting around behind the frame creating a bad angle for the bolts as they were going in. I think the one that got really stuck must have gone in cockeyed. We found that we could stick a screwdriver through one hole to hold it in place and line up the hole for one bolt, and then once that bolt was in half way we used that to move things around to line up the holes for the second bolt. Where there's a will there's a way!
Crisis over!!
