The story so far...

I have removed the rear fender, rear wheel, and swingarm from Tee-Bird's ER5 in order to (1) replace the broken fender, and (2) repaint the swingarm. So far so good.

But I cannot work out how the bolts that hold the IC Ignitor to the fender are supposed to work. The Haynes manual helpfully says - to remove the ignitor remove the bolts, and refitting is the reverse of removal.

The design of these bolts is a normal looking bolt, but instead of a nut there is a smooth brass ring, and the brass ring sits inside a sort of ||=||= shaped rubber grommet, where the top wide bit sits on one of the fender, and the lower wide bit sits below the fender.

The problem - I can't move the brass collar, I can't push the grommet through the hole in the fender with the bolt/collar inside it, and I can't push the bolt/collar through the grommet after attaching it to the fender.

Any ideas which method I should continue to try??

If there's no nut underneath, it sounds like the brass ring is tapped to accept the bolt. There should be enough resistance to allow you to turn the bolt (the inner ring is often 'keyed' into the parent material) but if it's rusted in then the whole lot will spin.

Time to get violent I reckon