Today is Sunday. I think I ate some of those tainted eggs yesterday and I've been down for half a day squirting things through parts of my body that nobody should know about.
Anyway, before I succumbed to intense intestinal distress, I had a chance to loosen all exhaust manifold bolts and attempt to eliminate the annoying sucking sound from my intake (yeah...sucking at the Jeep intake and blowing at my personal exhaust). While doing that job, I decided to swap out my melted Brown Dog poly bushings and take advantage of better access to the lower manifold bolts while the driver's side mount is removed.
Here's a shot of the poly bushing that melted a bit. Recall I swapped my motor mounts while still running a cracked stock exhaust manifold and the hot exhaust blew directly on the bushings, causing it to melt and run down the bracket. Brown Dog was good enough to send me a new bushing last month (free of charge) and I finally got around to installing it.
To remove this mount, I simply placed a 4x4 between my the oil pan and my floor jack and lifted the vehicle just enough to take the weight off of the engine. I then removed the through bolt, slipped off the engine mount, and removed the 5 remaining bolts to the engine bracket.
While the engine mount was removed, I loosened all of the 14 mm bolts to the intake manifold, then tightened down each one with a combination of flex head Gear wrench, socket and extension, and 14 mm open-end wrench that I modified for the job.
Since the engine mount is easy to remove (under 10 minutes), I decided that I will no longer fight the lower manifold bolts by wedging my arm between the down pipe and engine block just to reach bolts 5 and 6. Instead, I will always remove the engine mount to tighten those PITA bolts.
With all bolts tight and feeling good about the job, I re-installed the engine mount and air box. The new poly bushing seated perfectly and the engine mount looked as good as new. I then checked the passenger side for loose hardware.
I fired up the engine and immediately noticed a smoother idle, invariably due to a tighter engine mount installation (found one bolt loose upon removal). I still have a whistling sound at high rpm when I hit the accelerator, but it is not as pronounced as it was. My next idea is to swap out some of the vacuum lines at the intake manifold and replace the throttle body gasket.
One guy I know mentioned swapping my K&N filter back to my paper filter to see if that is causing my whistle. I did that this afternoon, between urgent visits to the porcelain god, but it did nothing to reduce the intake whistle. As for other ideas to eliminate this sucking sound, I may try releasing propane at my intake manifold and listen for an rpm change to pinpoint the source of leak. I'll probably need to swap out my intake gasket if nothing else works.
This has been a Sunday FB update. Busy work week ahead. Ugh.
