The 4-dimensional topological surgery conjecture has been established for a class of groups, including the groups of subexponential growth (see [6], [13] for recent developments), however the general case remains open. The full surgery conjecture is known to be equivalent to the question for a class of canonical problems with free fundamental group [5, chapter 12]. The proof of the conjecture for ‘good’ groups relies on the disk embedding theorem (see [5]), which is not presently known to hold for arbitrary groups. However, in certain cases it may be shown that surgery works even when the disk embedding theorem is not available for a given fundamental group (such results still use the disk-embedding theorem in the simply-connected setting, proved in [3]). For example, this is possible when the surgery kernel is represented by π1-null spheres [4], or more generally by a π1-null submanifold satisfying a certain condition on Dwyer's filtration on second homology [7]. Here we state another instance when the surgery conjecture holds for free groups. The following results are stated in the topological category.