To get everyone up to speed, while I was putting the intake manifold back on after doing the PCV system I discovered some stripped out bolt holes. This was a pretty significant blow to my moral, but explained why the car ran so poorly, and why the bolts were so loose when I undid them.
I couldn’t decide if I wanted to pull the head, send it off, and start with a fresher slate or not, so I decided to helicoil the threads. This was the first time I’d done a helicoil, and I was worried about punching a hole into a coolant jacket/oil passage. I didn’t, and I was able to repair the threads successfully… or so I thought. While tightening the bolts down, the one that was helicoiled wasn’t going in completely. I don’t know what possessed me to keep tightening but that’s what I did.
The bolt snapped, and the car then sat for the last 3 months? 4 months? This was also around the time I started TMS treatment, my wife lost her job, and everything in my life felt like it was collapsing in on me.
I had absolutely zero motivation to work on the car. I had no idea how I was going to get the broken bolt out of the head and thinking about it made me feel sick. I thought about cutting my losses and selling it as it was, but that idea really ate at me, and I decided against it.
Last week I gained enough motivation to get out and do some wrenching. I pulled the manifold, and to my surprise discovered the bolt hadn’t snapped in the head.
A source of tremendous frustration and despair was actually going to be much easier to resolve. So I got a stud remover tool and got back outside for the second time in a week. The stud remover did not end up working. There just wasn’t enough stud to grip or room to rotate the tool once I did get it to grip. I couldn’t double up nuts to get it out because I didn’t have any that would work or were small enough, so what the heck was I going to do?
Hammer a 7/32 socket onto the protruding stud of course! It came out no problem. It was that easy. So now I have a little totem to keep with the car. NEAT!
I ended up having to helicoil another thread in addition to this one. I should probably do all of them, but I’d just like to get the car running again. That’s a future Zoe problem to sort out. Not touching a project after a few months doesn’t make things easy when you come back to it. For example, remembering where all the intake piping goes.
I’m in the home stretch. I just need to tighten all the clamps down, make sure I have the vacuum lines routed correctly, and jump the battery. Then we get to find out if I screwed anything up! There’s still so much more to do on this car. I think my next priority will be tackling the oil leaks: front main and cam seals. I’d also like to do the oil pickup o-rings. Will likely hold off on that until I have a garage again.
Hopefully my next update will be about the car running!