I've been waiting for several weeks to get the time I needed to finally swap out my cracked exh manifold. Admittedly I was pretty anxious as I've read lot's of posts where bolts break, crud falls into the ports and all sort of other horrors.
Good news is mine was fairly painless. Still a lot of dirty, dirty work but everything came apart rather easily. I even replaced the studs and they double nutted right out! Whew!! The only "casualty" I had was one of the bolts holding the manifold to the downpipe. I couldn't get the right angle of the dangle and stripped the nut with my impact gun. A few minutes with my cutoff wheel took care of that.
I did have problems getting the lower bolt between cyl #4 and #5 back in. It's #1 in the torque sequence. There just wasn't enough clearance between the bolt head and the pipe to get a socket over. Fortunately, I tried something and it worked. I simply threaded that one in a couple of turns, just enough to hold it in. I was able to slip the intake manifold over it and get the locator pins to clear. It dropped right it. Since it was already a few turns in, I had just enough clearance to get a socket on it. The rest when in easy peezy.
Torquing was a bit of a challenge but I have tons of extensions, some with wobble ends and some very thin wall sockets so I was able to get everything clicked up mighty fine!
One thing I discovered removing the exh. The nut on the stud next to the firewall was only finger tight. I suspect I had a exhaust leak there as well.
Total time including scraping, cleaning, a 20 minute break and final test drive was about 5 hours.
I didn't "document" the process as there are already good writeups on it. I did take a few pics though.
This one is after everything's all apart. I haven't cleaned anything yet. I regret now that it's back together that I didn't change the CTS.
This is the crack in the #6 exh tube.
This is #5.
Good news is mine was fairly painless. Still a lot of dirty, dirty work but everything came apart rather easily. I even replaced the studs and they double nutted right out! Whew!! The only "casualty" I had was one of the bolts holding the manifold to the downpipe. I couldn't get the right angle of the dangle and stripped the nut with my impact gun. A few minutes with my cutoff wheel took care of that.
I did have problems getting the lower bolt between cyl #4 and #5 back in. It's #1 in the torque sequence. There just wasn't enough clearance between the bolt head and the pipe to get a socket over. Fortunately, I tried something and it worked. I simply threaded that one in a couple of turns, just enough to hold it in. I was able to slip the intake manifold over it and get the locator pins to clear. It dropped right it. Since it was already a few turns in, I had just enough clearance to get a socket on it. The rest when in easy peezy.
Torquing was a bit of a challenge but I have tons of extensions, some with wobble ends and some very thin wall sockets so I was able to get everything clicked up mighty fine!
One thing I discovered removing the exh. The nut on the stud next to the firewall was only finger tight. I suspect I had a exhaust leak there as well.
Total time including scraping, cleaning, a 20 minute break and final test drive was about 5 hours.
I didn't "document" the process as there are already good writeups on it. I did take a few pics though.
This one is after everything's all apart. I haven't cleaned anything yet. I regret now that it's back together that I didn't change the CTS.
This is the crack in the #6 exh tube.
This is #5.