More of a tale for your amusement, as the offending blighter of a sensor has now been evicted from its exhaust bung, and reduced to many small pieces...
My parent's P38 has had a bit of a bad time lately - tried setting fire to itself twice, once with fuel, then with a locked up caliper. New petrol line, entire ignition system, new front-rear brake lines, flexis, rear calipers, disks, pads... and then the bastard still refused to run right. Lean on bank 1 permanently. Lambda sensor looked like the culprit - refused to shift from 0v despite firing on all cylinders.
So... a new sensor it is. Pop the old one out, pop new one in, job done. Or not. With myself under the car pushing with my foot against the spanner, all I managed to do was round off the nut on the sensor. With a bottle jack forcing the spanner upwards, the car was lifting before the bottle jack eventually gave up, and I rounded another side off...
Friend of a friend offered to help - I think this car may no longer be welcome there! Even cherry red with grips, it still wouldn't shift. So, cross member off, exhaust studs all removed, and the centre box clamping plates cut through. On the bench, even more heat and a 2ft bar welded to the remains of the sensor - nope. Eventually, after the welds on the bar broke twice, it started to move with some persuasion from a set of stilsons.
Before it came out though... I noticed something:
I sent that photo to Marty while the sensor was still being massaged, and he said something about gaskets, and I realised... there was never any gasket on this side -_- I guess, had the sensor actually come out without a fight on the car, who knows how long it would have taken to find the exhaust leak, that was likely the problem all along...
But hey. Managed to find a nut that the new sensor threaded onto nicely, which was then welded on top of the old bung. New exhaust studs, a pair of new gaskets (ho hum, totally haven't been here before, prepared for this sort of crap these days), some nice work on the centre box clamps, and one adaptive reset later, it runs properly!