tortuga

Cody your car makes me miss my Riv. Like a lot.....

I was totally gonna just run the car at the race with the bad head gasket but I can't freakin tune it right with whatever its doing so last minute head gasket replacement/ head rebuilding (hopefully) it is!


Got to tearing things down... That's how far I got from 11:30pm after getting off work to about 1:30am or so I dunno. There's lots of things to kinda follow up on from Jan '12...


I pulled the wires off and saw the coil posts for cyl's 4 & 6? are like corroded fairly heavily - I wonder if that was causing my misfires... you see problems and hope they are the cause of some of the symptoms right?


Here's another new surprise for me. For some reason a bunch of my valve stem seals just threw themselves off and are just chillin up towards the top of the valve! ok...

Other thoughts at the moment..
Those thick-as-hell Karropak gaskets I made out of the cut-yourself roll for the supercharger/intercooler gaskets along with the super blue rtv-like sealer worked like an absolute charm! That gaskets came off 100% in tact with ease, no signs of leaking. If it weren't for the oil residue from the intake tract and pcv and whatnot, I'd almost reuse them! Instead I'm going with a roll of the reinforced silicone sheet that PRJ recommends. It's a LOT easier to work with (cutting and punching holes) than those Karropak ones I made.

So tomorrow morning first thing I need to bring the Intense Stage 3 heads over to Opel Engineering and see about at least getting new valve guides put in since they were in very much used shape when James and I installed em last year. If we determine the heads could use it, I might get into putting in new hardened seats and stuff - all depending on the time line and what they tell me when I bring the heads over there. If we determine that It can't realistically be done in time (by middle/end of next week), I'm going to just take the heads right back home and just put them on as is over the weekend.

holy crap. are you going to be ready for Chicago?!~

I sure hope so

Nice smooth intake runners you got there!

Pics after the heads are off? (any signs of exactly where the head gaskets are leaking?) Very rare to have a head gasket leak. Did you retorque the heads after 500 miles when they were put together?

What would normally keep valve seals from riding up like that?

wow,that is really depressing

Quote :

Very rare to have a head gasket leak. Did you retorque the heads after 500 miles when they were put together?

I think the gaskets were reused at one point.

AA wrote:

Quote :

Very rare to have a head gasket leak. Did you retorque the heads after 500 miles when they were put together?

I think the gaskets were reused at one point.

ooooohh okay.

AA wrote:

Quote :

Very rare to have a head gasket leak. Did you retorque the heads after 500 miles when they were put together?

I think the gaskets were reused at one point.

Does he have those re-usable cometic gaskets?

T Riley wrote:

AA wrote:

Quote :

Very rare to have a head gasket leak. Did you retorque the heads after 500 miles when they were put together?

I think the gaskets were reused at one point.

Does he have those re-usable cometic gaskets?

smartass lol
yeah, they're actually the same exact gaskets as the regular ones except they come packaged with solvent cleaner, a can of copper spray, radiator stop leak, and a little note card that says "yeah just add an ayextra 20ft lbs to whatever your head bolt torque spec is!"

Did you ever find out what was taking so long with your pillar panels?

J. Chris Davis wrote:

Did you ever find out what was taking so long with your pillar panels?

I called him up and basically he said they're just sitting on his bench and he'll get to 'em soon. They've been doing tons of estimates and stuff right now but not really getting any business or something. I sent him some printed out shots of yours which he said helped. Anyway yeah, it's been a well over a year since I started that little project; I'm not gonna rush it too hard now. lol

Oh ok. Well hopefully you get them back soon.

Updates on the heads
The intake valve stems are pretty worn and Opel is saying I really need to replace 3 of the valves. I looked at em and there is a little step you can feel dragging your finger down the stem on really all the intake valves from wear. These heads have plenty of miles on them so I shouldn't be too surprised - that's why I brought 'em there. I just got off the phone with Intense. Unfortunately the valves are pretty much custom made by Manley for Intense (not just a part number I can ask Opel to order) so I pretty much have no other choice but to order new valves from intense. Another $191.53 later, I have a full set of intake valves on order that'll hopefully make it to Opel Tuesday or Wed at the latest. They say there should be no problem getting the heads done in 1 or 2 days so I'm gonna be cutting it real close. I'm gonna call them up and push em to have it done Wed by the time they close and then take thursday off work to put everything back together which will give me friday to either finish up or even better, get to tuning the car and whatnot.
Besides that I asked if we can do anything with rehardening/replacing the actual seats in the heads but they said it's pretty much a no-go on my heads with them being relatively compact heads and massively ported - just not enough room to do anything like that. So I have no idea what my valve seat recession is like right now much less the future but I guess we're just leaving it be. The seals - still nobody really knows anything positively but the guy working on my heads said that the seal size/design isn't really the greatest and he can make up something much better fitting for my heads there - fine.

Kinda scary I'm supposed to be racing in 2.5 days and I'm still looking at a bare longblock...



the cometic gaskets were a little worse than I thought lol


front header - white, white, black... ok


new silicone blower-IC gasket

new silicone IC-intake gasket


James gave me those metal tubes yanked out of a set of L32 fuel rails. They are fuel pressure pulsation dampeners. I guess They're filled with some shit that contracts quite a bit under fuel pressure so they kinda of keep an equilibrium inside the fuel rails. I'd like to use them but they don't seem to want to fit in my -8AN rails. If there's time, I may screw with them and try to make them fit but I just thought that was kinda of interesting.

Anyway fun stuff while I take a break and let my knees recover a while from bending backwards over the hood for hours!
I was at work 2:45pm-4:15am this morning working on a bunch of turtle parts on top of regular work. Took some pictures of stuff


This is just a pair of 1/32" rocker base shims getting made using the rocker pedestal plate as a model. I kinda of made this as a just-in-case thing if it comes in handy with setting up valve train geometry. I can easily take these back to work and surface grind them down to anything smaller than what they are right now (.031"). I figured I can use all the leverage I can get since I don't really know how my valvetrain will end up with things being altered from before.

now the HD-IC mod! (TM)


I got a big-ass angle plate and mounted the IC to it with a level on top. The cores don't sit in the housing straight but it's kinda close enough for what I'm doing and indicating center around each tube.


3/16"ish end mill going right around the tube. Really we're cutting more silicone out of this area than aluminum. My tubes were pretty eneven to start with so I ended up going .165" deep on and and .100" deep on the other IIRC - my notes are still at work. That gave me enough room to get a thin style hose clamp comfortably around the tube after I trimmed the tubes all the way down to the fatter sections.


Then I got a little more fancy and added a relief for the worm portion of the clamp and another step to give some extra clearance to the screw driver or socket that'll end up tightening the clamp for install


There's the profile, and my proprietary solution to keep chips out of the tubes lol





All so we can do that.. More water flow! So that makes everything for my IC strictly 3/4"

holy shit. you're a Riv junky and I love it. KEEP US UPDATED. GOOD LUCK.

Thanks for the update! Nice head gaskets... lesson learned?

Cod, are you still planning on racing this weekend?

Good job bro! lookin' mighty fine

charlieRobinson wrote:

Cod, are you still planning on racing this weekend?

I'm tryin'!
I just got the new tires mounted and dropped my n2o bottle off to get filled.
I'm working on cleaning/prepping hardware and heads which is a bitch because Opel repainted them and didn't really mask off anything so I have to clean all the threads and holes out really good and exhaust gasket/fastener surfaces, etc. Once I get the heads on, I'm going to have to figure out valvetrain stuff which will eat up time but one that's done, it should start coming together pretty fast I hope. There's no way I'm going to be able to spectate tomorrow as I'll have tons to finalize and tune and whatnot.

We're all rooting for you man! Keep at it!

Good luck! Hoping things work out!

Updates brah??? Hope everything is smooth sailing!!

Cod, are you racing today or what?!