I discovered today that my plenum gasket now officially sucks wind. And oil, money, and time, too.

Gonna do the timing set while I'm in there. If nothing else, doing it will allow me to stop thinking about doing it and will get the gasket set off of the shelf and onto the engine. It's good housekeepin', dang it!

 

Replaced my broken plastic light switch with this metal led one. Also changed the oil.

 

Fixed the truck today, took a new water pump, tstat, and bypass hose.

Bypass hose had swollen and there was a little tear in the hose.

Took forever to get the damn clutch fan off, ended up cheating and taking a long screw driver and putting it in one of the holes on the pulley and using a mini sledge hammer to beat it up by one of the wp bolts and gave the wrench a good whack with the sledge and she came free.

Pain in the ***.

 

uh, wp pulley doesnt come off bud... clutch fan does.

may want to fix that.

glad you got it fixed!

 

Replaced the front pads and rotors. Looks like calipers are in the future as well. But at least now it stops without pulling to the right.

 

Oops!

I was sleepy.

 

Scratch that. Bad assumption. The engine is losing oil somewhere but it's not into the intake manifold -- it's my trusty 30 year old vacuum gauge that's sucking wind. I saw low oil on the diptick and low vacuum on the gauge, said to myself, "Self, that's all you need to know". But I was wrong, just as I tend to always be when making assumptions.

So, today I did the test from TSB 09-05-00 and saw pressure instead of vacuum, peered down into the intake and saw that fine steel pan looking just as it did four years ago, pulled out all of those expensivum plugs and found 'em all looking fan-freaking-tastic, did a compression test that leaves me thinking that my 30 year old compression tester has gone into politics because it won't tell the same story twice but still gave me comfy enough numbers that I'm not worried (120-150 all the way around), and just as I was about to call it good I broke off the air hat stud in the throttle body about 3/16" into the hole...

Just in time to find out that among the tools that have run away from home are my screw extractors. (That's how often I break hardware... they've been missing either six years or twelve depending upon which thief got 'em.) So now I get to remove that broken piece the hard way if it's going to get done tonight, or the easy way tomorrow after the hard way fails and the stores that might have screw extractors to sell are open.

FML. All that work and still no idea where the oil's going. I'll find it, but not tonight. As long as it's not getting into the cylinders I'm happy enough for now about everything except that stinking broken stud.

[UPDATE] I found an even older and crappy set of screw extractors hiding in the garage and there just happened to be the right size in it. Now to burn a flower and go clean up the garage!

 

Been in the middle of moving, leaded up a couple of truck loads of stuff with it, been driving it everywhere, over 100 miles on Saturday.

 

Stock air cleaner - 1
Round air filter? - 0

 

It's a K&N. Totally tubular, dude.