Transcription
Here's before, and here's after. P4 after. Take a look at this. Just a few weeks ago, and about two videos ago, I replaced my entire intake manifold gasket set. Along with that job, you do have to use gasket maker to seal the front and back of that intake manifold.
Looking at the rear of this intake manifold with a mirror, you can see a little bit of that gasket maker popping out there, but you can also see some oil right there on that edge. That gasket maker—I just didn't do it right. I didn't put enough on there. And unfortunately, because of that one small detail, I have to redo this entire job, and it's a big job.
Now, if you haven't seen that intake manifold gasket replacement video I'm talking about, I'll link it in the cards above and I'll try to link it down in the description below as well. That was a tough job. I waited a long time because I knew it was going to be a very involved, difficult process, and I detail all of that in that previous video, so check it out if you're curious about that.
Now, in that video, I specifically talk about the use of gasket maker on the front and rear portions of this intake manifold gasket area. Of course, for the sides, I use drop-in gaskets by Felpro, and they seem to be very good. I just bought the same exact ones; matter in fact, here they are right here. And you can see this tube of stuff right here in the middle. Now, this is the provided gasket maker that Felpro gave me, and there is enough, I believe, in this one tube to cover, cover both the front and rear areas with enough gasket maker to do the job.
The problem, though, is with me. See, I did a little too much research on this job, believe it or not. I had never used gasket maker to form a gasket before, at least I don't think I have. Now, gasket maker is fairly simple to use. I mean, you can just use your common sense most of the time. But being that this was such an important job, it was such a big job, I wanted to make sure that I was using the right type of gasket maker and that I was using the right amount of gasket maker. I wanted to make sure I didn't have to do this job again. Lo and behold, when you do a lot of research like that, you come up with a lot of different opinions on how to do something, and I chose one of them that I thought was good, and I unfortunately didn't use enough gasket maker.
That being said, after the job, the truck drove really well. I was really impressed with how smooth it was; it even seemed like it had more power. But as soon as I got home, I started smelling a little bit of oil. All right, I'm having to do this job again. See how hard this is to take off? Yep. Oh, okay. Not as hard as before. Not as hard. And we're dumping. Oh, we're dumping. But wait, there's more. Well, these are brand new gaskets, just installed a few weeks ago, and it looks like most of it stayed here on the head. And I'm really, really hoping that these come off in one piece and there's not a lot of scraping to do. Looking here at the manifold side, you can see that for the most part the surface is nice and clean. There is a little bit I'm gonna have to try to scrape off of there, but nothing like it was with the original gaskets.
But now let's look at the culprit, the whole reason why I'm redoing this job. Look at that oil on that surface right there. Yeah, that was pouring down the back of my engine onto my exhaust manifolds and other parts. Luckily, that gasket maker is pretty tough, so it was still in one piece, and I put it back on pretty close to exactly where it was when I installed it. So right away, I can see a major problem, and that is quite simply that I didn't use enough. You can see areas like this right here that didn't really even get smashed down. Then if we look at this spot, but here, yeah, it may have gotten smashed down a little bit, but certainly not enough. Just look at how thin of a bead I put on right there. And if we look up here on the front side of the engine, we could see that I did apply a little bit more than I did on the rear, and for that reason, this side had just enough, and I don't think this side was actually leaking. I think the culprit was the rear side.
Now seriously, I get it. You might be wondering how in the world I could have applied so little gasket maker to those surfaces. Well, as I said in the beginning, this was the first time I had ever really done anything like this. You gotta understand, in my mind, I made a mistake. I was imagining the manifold and the block of the engine literally coming down almost completely flush to each other, so I was thinking, well, I'm not going to use tons of it because it'll just smash out the side and roll back into the engine and get ground up and clog up oil filters and things like that. Little did I think about that the actual dry drop-in Felpro gaskets are thick enough that they leave a pretty good gap there, and so I didn't really account for that. So you do have to apply, especially with thicker gaskets like these, you have to apply almost more gasket maker than you think you need because the two surfaces aren't coming as close together as it seems, even as they were from the factory. So if that makes any sense, I think that's where I made the mistake.
All right, I guess we can go ahead and see how much scraping I'm going to have to do here on the head side. I'm going to try to peel off this gasket and hopefully none of it sticks. I don't think it will, except for where I put gasket maker underneath to hold it. Please come off with no scraping. Well, that was easy. Yes. Well, let's hope that this passenger side is as easy to remove. Uh-oh. Feels a little bit more difficult. Oh, okay. That was easy. Just popped right off, and we have literally almost no scraping to do whatsoever. That is awesome. So I went and bought this big tube of Ultra Gray. Now the first time I got nervous and didn't want to apply too much, but that came back to bite me in the end. So I'm actually going to apply the amount I feel like I need here. I'm going to do this kind of bead pattern here to make sure that, to make sure I'm not putting too little, there's no air bubbles or pockets. My hands at a weird angle, so it's making my, my handshake, yes. For good measure, I'll put another little blob right there. All right, that's definitely more than I need, but I think that'll do.
Okay, the gasket maker is now applied to both the front and back end caps. I'm now going to set the new Felpro gaskets in place, and I want to do this gently. We do have some gasket maker that I put on the heads here to try to hold this gasket in place while I set these two. Sliding a little bit. Okay. Now that we have both gaskets set in place, I am going to grab this manifold without messing anything up. I'm pulling up on the fuel lines; that's the only obstruction. Now, with it approximately the correct area here, I'm going to go ahead and set it down. Okay, that's good. That's all set. Good. Okay, I currently have the corner-most bolts snugged up, not super tight, just snug, and you can see right here how I have some of that gasket maker squeezing out just a little bit, and that's exactly what we want. And you can see there's a little more on this side as well. And taking a peek at the rear of this manifold, you can also see that gasket maker squeezing out there, and that is exactly what we want.
Now there's multiple instructions here that I'm trying to decipher. You can see this paper one here is the one that was included with the gaskets by Felpro, and they give you pretty good general instructions on how to install this stuff. But of course, the instructions on the back of the Permatex Ultra Gray talk about something a little different. You can see the end of number two there; it says, "Assemble parts immediately while silicone is still wet. Finger tighten until material begins to squeeze out around flange." Then it says, "Number three, let dry for one hour and tighten to torque specifications. Number four, allow 24 hours to fully cure before filling with fluids or returning to service." So as it sits, I've set the intake manifold and snugged up the four corner bolts, hopefully giving that finger tight that they wanted per the instructions from Permatex. It does say to tighten until that gasket maker starts squeezing out the ends, and that's exactly what I did. So at this point, I think I have about 45 minutes left to wait until I tighten all of these bolts down to spec.
I've waited now about 45 minutes, and so I'm going to start applying this thread sealant to these bolts, and I'm going to go ahead and snug them down. And then as soon as I'm done with that, I'll go ahead and start the torquing process. The maximum torque on these per the manufacturer says about 35 pound-feet of torque, but I'm going to do steps up to that, so I think I'm going to do about 10 pound-feet, then I'll go about 20, 25, and then finally up to 35, and I'll do multiple passes at 35 just to make sure that through tightening, you know, certain bolts that other ones didn't get loose, something like that. Is actually probably a little too much thread sealer, but we're going to go with it. The first one on the list is this passenger middle rear bolt. We'll go ahead and get that started. Every one of the bolts now have thread locker on them, and they are all hand tight. I'm going to go ahead and start the sequence of torquing them down. First bolt I'm going to tighten down is this middle set on the passenger side, the rearmost bolt, and I have my small quarter-inch torque wrench, but I have an adapter, and I'm going to go ahead and torque this down to 10 foot-pounds. The next bolt goes over to the driver's side rear. Again, there's 10.
One of the biggest stresses of this whole job, aside from the manifold itself, is this distributor. I think I did it. Wow. Well, hopefully you can tell my marks are lined up down there, and the distributor is fully seated. And the other good news is this rotor is lined up with my marks down there. You can see the single mark over here is where the rotor ends as I pull this thing out, and of course, the reverse is going to happen upon installation. It's going to start here, and as you push it in, the rotor is going to turn and line up with my marks right down there. It's been a few days, which means that Ultra Gray gasket maker has had plenty of time to harden up. I also just installed and torqued down the throttle body as well as attached the fuel lines, and now I just have to put everything else back together, which includes a lot of the electrical connectors, the hoses, the vacuum hoses and brackets and stuff like that.
While I'm doing an oil change, and I've also pulled all my spark plugs. The reason for the oil change is kind of obvious: when you pull that intake manifold, there's a lot of antifreeze that goes back down into that oil valley and ultimately down into the oil, so you have to change the oil because there's a lot of water and antifreeze in it. The reason why I pulled the spark plugs is actually there's two reasons: number one, because I'm going to do a full tune-up on this thing. I already have brand new spark plugs, plug wires, a cap and rotor that I'm going to throw on this thing. But the second reason is because, well, because I wanted to start this thing with no spark plugs in it. You see, when I pulled that intake manifold, I watched some antifreeze go down some of the intake ports. That was my fault; I should have been more careful when I was pulling that thing off of there, but you know, stuff happens, and I watched some antifreeze go down the intake port, so I don't want to start it up because liquids don't compress. I don't want to start this thing up and have antifreeze down in there in the cylinder and the piston goes up and everything gets messed up. So I'm going to give it a few revolutions with no spark plugs to hopefully expel any sort of liquids that are in that cylinder, and hopefully that'll do the trick. Then I can continue on with my tune-up.
The new oil filter and the oil drain plug are back in place. I'm going to fill this thing up with oil. This 5.7-liter engine takes five quarts of oil, and that's exactly what's in this jug. All right, it looks like this is my fuel pump relay right here. I'm just going to go ahead and pull this out. This way, when I start it and give it a few revolutions, it's not going to be pumping fuel. So every single thing is back in order. The only thing I've done is disconnected that coil, and you can see the middle coil wire is not on there, are these plugs right here, and that's obviously because, because I'm not trying to start this thing right now. I have all the plugs out and the plug wires off, and again, the whole purpose of this is just to give this thing a few revolutions to try to get those pistons to push out any fluid that may be there in the cylinders. Well, here's hoping that I put everything back together right. Let's go ahead and give it a few cranks.
Here in the next few days, I'll be doing a full tune-up on this truck, but for now, I'm going to take these old spark plugs and replace them with these nice fresh new ones. Here you can see the old and new plugs side by side, and I do have to gap these plugs. The manufacturer recommends .035, and these come out of the box at .040, so I just took my gapper here and gapped it, and we are just about .035. Then I'll go ahead and slide it into my 5/8 spark plug socket and I'll thread it in by hand, and now I can finish it off with my ratchet, just like that. And since I already have all of the old spark plugs out, it'll be no problem to go ahead and install the brand new ones. Now I'm going to fill this thing back up with some antifreeze. Everything's now buttoned up. I've checked the oil. I've added antifreeze, which I still need to get a little bit more, but we are ready to start this thing, so I'll go ahead and put the key in and let it prime a few times. All right, starts right up. That's good. Engine's running nice and smooth. That's good.
Now I did decide to take my time with this project because I kind of, sort of messed it up the first time. I didn't want to rush through anything and do something wrong, so that's why it's taken me multiple days. Again, of course, there's also the filming part of it, but this is going to be a great test to see the difference between the little amount of gasket maker that I used the first time and the large amount of gasket maker I use this time. I gave the gasket maker plenty of time to harden up, so here's hoping that it holds. We have no oil leaks. Well, first of all, thank you for watching all 15 plus minutes of this video, and I'm sure at this point you're just wondering, hey, did it work? Did you fix the problem? And the answer is, well, yeah. I've been driving this thing around for a few days now. I've put plenty of miles on it. I've driven my family in it, which tells you my confidence in the fix, and I have yet to see a single drip, a single sweat, a single even ounce of anything not working with this gasket maker. Yes, in the video you can tell I put a lot on there, but I think that's exactly what I needed. Like I said, I've probably put, I don't know, over a hundred miles on this thing so far, and I've checked with my little mirror and a flashlight every single day before I drive this thing to see if any oil has sweated out or anything like that, and happy to report again, nothing. The gasket maker is bone dry. There's no more oil dripping down the back of the engine, somehow getting onto the exhaust manifolds and my other exhaust areas producing oil smoke. None of that. So I'm super happy right now because now I can drive my truck. Oh yeah, and the truck is driving a lot better than it did before I attempted this intake manifold gasket job. The original manifold gaskets were definitely leaking; there was oil already leaking down the front and back of the engine, though not that bad, but it was just annoying. And I'm pretty sure we had a vacuum leak somewhere because of those intake manifold gaskets, and because of all that, it prompted me to want to do this job, and unfortunately, I've done it twice now, so now I'm a professional at it, right? Anyways, guys, if you enjoyed this video, please don't forget to hit that thumbs up, and also if you've watched this far and you're not a subscriber, consider subscribing. I'm Jimmy, for One Road, and I will see you in the next one.