The last I blogged about my Mustang I had finished up the installation of the new dash pad and replaced all the bulbs and cleaned up a few years of dust.
If you recall (well you don’t have to, just go back and read the posts) I talked about planning and how I could have saved time by waiting to put new dash pad on (not cap, pad) until the pillar molding came, but I decided not too. The molding came in today….so out with the old….
Old cracked and broken
And in with the new:
New
Mustang Unlimited
I have pretty good luck with Mustang Unlimted’s parts and service. I recommend them. (No I don’t get paid for plugs or compensated.)
These will have to be painted which is very common with interior parts. I even had to paint the replacement arm rest. I have the paint and I’ll post up the entire process.
I finally got the exhaust manifold taken care of (I didn’t do it). But apparent when I had the custom exhaust with hooker headers created and installed, they didn’t use locketight and they loosed up with the vibration of daily and drag strip racing. The right side had to be replaced and the left side was just tightened. Oh she sounds so much better.
Thanks for reading. I’ll get the pillar molding replacement pretty quick.
I’ve been tied up the last couple days, with…CAR stuff…more vette drama…that’ll be coming up.
I’m sure most of us have products and tools we’ve tried and liked and some we tried and hated.
When you get a minute drop me a note with them and tell me why you liked or didn’t.
Here are a couple of mine.
Eagle One makes some good products, but they also make Tire Detailer – Tire Shine Gel. It says it last 2x longer than sprays.
Eagle One
Hey..that is true…100%, no lie, no bs.
Only problem is never dries. And when you drive your car it will spread the entire length of your car. It creates a huge mess. It forms black greasy marks on your fenders, doors, quarter panels, bumpers…etc. It make a huge mess on your wheels. I have Center line wheels, with rivets and spinner.
Mustangs Center Line Wheels
Every nook and cranny had this greasy black gel in it. Every rivet, valve stem and outer rim.
I know you are saying…”Well done put so much on.” You might have a point. But once you have it on..try getting it off. I placed this on my Mustang 3 weeks ago. In week two I was wiping down the car after every drive. In week three, I washed the tires with orange cleaner. And still today when I washed the Mustang, there were new streaks on the paint, bumper, wheel wells, side lights and outer rims. I scrubbed the wheels with soap and wiped them down, but you can still see where the gel hangs on.
This product is for a trailer queen car, not one you drive to shows. Avoid this product.
One reason I hadn’t made blog entry in past couple of days is because I was tuning up the 84 Vette. All that oil leaking fouled up the plugs. Well as luck would have it, while replacing the plugs I had a plug break. Just the porcelain. This happens!!!! So I stuck the spark plug socket back on what was left of the plug and removed it. It did seem a bit hard to get out, but I didn’t think much about it at the time.
Errrkk……Stop me if you’ve heard this…this particular plug was in “the spot”. You know what I mean. The spot!!….The place you can’t reach..the place you have to turn around backward and place your hand facing palm up, bend down on one knee, tip your head up and lower your shoulder (WOW..that also sounds like my golf swing!!!!) to get to. Of course you can’t tighten it that way, you have to get your 16″ ratchet extensions, with a swivel and a 2″ extension and under and round the AC hoses. You know the spot!!!
As I contorted my body to put the new one, I couldn’t get it to catch on the first thread. No amount of bending, twisting or non-PC language, could get that in. Now..comes the scary thought….striped thread.!!!!!! If you have ever put a spark plug in and know what part of the car you are sticking it in….you are feeling my initial pain or panic or depression, actually all of them. It could be a lot of work and $$$ to fix that right! (Pulling heads, to heli coil it or re-tap it or buying a new head..set of heads.)
There on last hope:
Thread Chasers!!!!
Oh..yes…queque the super hero music!!!! These babies are life savers.
Briefly here is how this works.
Find the thread size for the spark plug you are having an issue with. (oh..these aren’t made just for spark plug.) Center the chaser on hole as if you were putting the spark plug and turn it by hand. In my case I as in the contorted position described above and turned it a tight as I could by hand. After that I put together the extension, swivel (also call a universal) and extension. I could feel the hesitation of the thread not wanting to catch, but then..success and the chaser run down the rest of the threads with easy. Problem? Most likely a burr or piece of thread from the old spark plug!!!
Bottom line…get yourself a set of these. Snap-on has them. the are called “Spark plug Hole Reconditioning Tool” An old Snap_on number is TCS14ST.
Send me your liked and disliked tools or products.
Just when you thought it was safe………. Leaking again. New FelPro gaskets and new covers and a new leak.
At this point I have a few options still available, but first I grabbed the torque specs for the 84 vette’s valve covers bolt. Now the only issue here is that the specs are for the magnesium covers, not aluminum.
One suggestion I received from another Vette, was to use the spec but drop 1/4 of the suggested torque. Now I did apply the torque setting to the magnesium covers, maybe that caused the crack – I don’ t think that was the case however. Keeping this suggestion in mind I guessed that I should use the suggest torque and see how that goes.
So I did just that and they still leaked. Next I decide to increase the torque by 1/4. And….you ..guessed it…they still leaked!!!
So now I’m as happy as “polecat in live trap”. ERRRKKK….I stole that phrase from a guy I use to work with back in Texas. Texans have a lot of sayings, being from New York, I didn’t understand most of them, but some are very clever and get the point across really well, some are not straight forward and border on being an inside “joke”.
What’s next? I give them a small quick tweak and I check the oil and drive it down the street to a guy I mentioned in a very early post in my blog. Tim Sisk, runs a chain automotive repair and normally that wouldn’t be where I’d take a 84 Crossfire engine, not too many of us Crossfire owners would. However, Tim is good and has experience with older Mustangs and has worked on 60 and 70 vettes – and frankly, that’s got me beat.
They pulled the covers and re-seated the gaskets and it still leaked. Now if read all the blog entries you’ll recall (hey…if you haven’t…go back…there’s some good stuff in there…) that I purchased some additional sets of gaskets, one cork based and another made of metal and rubber. I dropped those off and they put them on …and hey…no leaking…..yet!!!!
So the FelPro didn’t work and perhaps might have been a partial cause of the cracking of the original cover, but maybe not. The Mr. Gasket metal/rubble combo worked.
Finished this up today. Here are some pics. (Yeah..I know..forgot to take them before I put the air cleaner on…but you get the idea.)
Only issue..the thickness of the chrome covers was less than the originals and I had to get a shorter set of chrome bolts. I have got quite a collection for chrome bolts now!!
Ok..let me finish up blogging to you on this event. I had a read ask if it has really taken this long and the answer is No and Yes. (I’ll explain the YES in a bit..it ain’t pretty!!!!)
After find the correct bolts, wrestling the covers back into place was, I bolted them down. Installed they looked pretty good.
Check it out.
Left side painted and installed. Still missing the emblem..right now
The only difficulty was aligning the holes in the cover and the gasket and the engine. Due to the lack of room to maneuver I wasn’t able to keep the gasket and cover holes aligned while wrestling them into place. I used two (small enough to slide into the threaded holes without damaging) phillips head screw driver to help keep them aligned and put the bolts in.
Errrkk……whatever you do tighten them carefully…..let me spell that for you (Mickey Mouse Club tune playing in my head) C…A….R.(because you care about your car)…E…F….U…L…L…(cause you want to keep the oil full)…..Y…(because if you tighten too much on the 1984 C4 magnesium valve covers you’ll crack them and they can’t be welded, JB or other wise, and then you’ve got to find used ones, because aftermarket aren’t all that great)….Ok…end of Mickey Mouse Club song…and the end of one of the original valve covers….
And in case you didn’t get the between the lines intention of the above Errrkkkk…I broken one.
I wasn’t sure at first, my mind refused to process the sound so that I could be sure..it might have been a crack, or maybe I just crunched one of the plastic tubes covering a bundle of wires. Yeah..that’s it…I sure (it might have been a crack though….crap!!…let me spell that for you…oh…never mind….just invision huge font type all in upper case, bolded and underlined.)
I inspected the cover while it was in place and I couldn’t see anything and said…ok.average guy.. with average skills and average budget..you have above average luck…at least today…at least that’s what I thought…or hoped.
When that happens the only way to tell is to either take the cover back off and inspected…that wasn’t going to happen…or let her run and build up the oil pressure and see what happens….that is what you’d normally do any way after replace the gaskets.
Here she is running: (includes bonus views of the injectors…I think they are pretty cool to watch.)
Covers don’t look to bad…but they aren’t going to stay…because..there really was a crack…but it didn’t show up by leaking on this run…it should up the next day when I took the car to work. I checked it when I arrived (about a 15 minute drive) no leaking…drove it home and she started to run poorly and had no power…yeah….it was leaking…on to a spark splug….got home and a little puddle of oil formed under the car and…well lets just say as I replaced the tightening episode in my head the crunching noise…sounded a lot more like a crack..in fact it was very clear on the replay!!!! The little referee in my head….said ‘After reviewing the play..the ruling in the garage is over turned, and Tim is charged a time out and $400.00 fine for cracking the cover and the vette gets parked until the parts get here!’
Here is the pick where the crack occurred.
Yup...cracked!!!!
That was Monday (4/5/2010) fast forward to today new cover have arrived (chrome) and they’ll be installed today or tomorrow. So Yes it was finished and now No it’s not.
I’m now at the point where I can re-install the valve covers. I’ve painted them and cleaned up the gromets (for one of my vette buddies who was dismayed when the saw the interim pics).
If you remember I had to remove a few things including vacuum hoses, spark plug wires, a/c parts. In addition the bolts that hold the covers down had spark plug wire holders and other brackets for hold wires.
Brackets that would mount through with the bolt for the covers passing through.
Keep this in mind as I explain what I learned from my decision to use Fel-Pro gaskets.
Ok..fine enough dramma..lets get to the lesson I learned (which is often learned the hard way when you have average skills and less than average experience).
I am not smarter than the engineers at GM. They knew what they were doing when the used permatex…it was all about the bolts. Specifically, the length the engineers decided do use, or maybe it was the budget guys. They knew how to follow the build sheet. Here is the bottom line. The length of the bolts supported the thin layer of the permatex and the brackets shown above and that was it.
They did not support the thickness of the gaskets. They were just under a 1/4 too short. With the brackets and the Fel-Pro gasket in place barely two threads poke out, not enough to catch the thread on the engine. errrk….When did I know this and what got into your head to do it anyway?
Fare enough question. I found out when I queried a couple of Corvette forums about what gaskets to use. I got a lot of responses, everyone has an opinion..ya know!!! But only one had actually done an 84 C4 and he said..if you don’t use permatex you are going to have to get longer bolts and BTW your bracket for the spark holders won’t fit. So I knew this before I picked up the valve covers (but not before I ordered the set from the supplier).
Why I didn’t go with the permatex solution was the amount of space and jostling what I had to do when I took them out. I was pretty sure getting them back in would be worse and the changes of wiping off the some of the permatex and messing up the seal, making the odds of redoing it high.
Finding the longer bolt took some doing. The auto parts store…yes..yes.. the same one that said they didn’t have anything but cork and when querying another employee show me what I and originally asked for..didn’t have the proper bolts. The 84 C4 was all metric, bolts and nuts, you can even switch the digital the dash from US to metric. The heads are 11mm the threads were 6mm and the pitch was 1/4.
I ended up at ACE hardware and the only thing that would work and look good were the chrome. Ok…average guy with average budget…warning..they weren’t cheap…I know that when the manger took me to the back of the store and showed me a stack of boxes that were padlocked shut. They lock them up!!!! They were over $2.00 each, washers were nearly a $1.00.
So I decided on the chrome but they only had 7 bolts..I needed eight with washers as well, they only had 1 washer. When did we as a nation have a shortage chrome??? Any way I went ot another Ace and the guy there didn’t have any, but tried to tell me the ones I purchased at the other ACE wasn’t correct. He had the washers so I picked those up and traveled to the next ACE (they’re a lot like Walgreens..they’re on nearly every corner here in Tucson).
Replacing the covers was about the same as removing them and while doing it I was very glad I didn’t use the permatex, most of it wouldn’t have made it on the covers or the engine. I’m thinking at the GM factory they put the valve covers on before the AC and all the vacuum hoses and alternator…etc.
Tomorrow I’ll finish this up….well maybe…one more lesson was in store.
So now I have the valve covers off and I’ve scraped the old permatex off the covers and the engine.
As you might expect the covers are a mess.
A mess
The other is no cleaner.
I used brake cleaner to get them clean..well at least cut the grease and grime..and a paint prep to get the ready for painting.
I had purchased paint from the corvette parts supplier, specifically for valve covers. As I state previously it gets pretty hot under there.
That took a good portion of the day. And here is the out come. errrrkkkk….don’t worry the when you see the paint grommets, I cleaned them up nicely.
Right side
and
Right side
So that was a pretty quick bit of work. While these were drying I cleaned up the engine a bit and remove any debris that was got in the valve area.
Tomorrow we’ll discuss just why I learned they used permatex at the factory and tell you why I didn’t. Sigh..and I’ll tell you about what that decision cost me!!!
