Under hard acceleration I'm getting some detonation. My truck is completely stock so I'm running 87. Anything I could do other than run 89? What could be causing this? Could it just be the gas?

 

use the search button at the top and search for "plenum" and "pinging". you'll get about 100,000,000,000,000 hits for the leaking belly pan gasket attached to the bottom of the manifold. every 5.2 and 5.9 has it. other causes are bad gas and carbon build up.

 

you could use some octane booster, or if your truck has more than 100,000 miles on it i would start running chevron engine restore. It really seemed to help my truck all around stops burning oil and seals all the nicks in the cylinder and the cylinder walls. Also i think that the engine restore reduced pings in mine as well.

 

Could also try switching to a 180 t-stat or switch to a cooler spark plugs (i.e. autolite 3923's).

 

There are two ways cking the intake for leaks, 1st look down the throttle bore with it open and engine off, if you see lots of oil on the plate, you may have a leak. 2nd take the air breather hose off at the air cleaner housing and remove the pcv valve from the valve cover, the plug the breather hose with your thumb and with other hand, put a finger over the hole where the pcv valve was in the valve cover. You do this with engine running, if your finger trying to be suck into the valve cover, then you have a leak. There is also a tsb to move spark plug wires and a flash update that will retard the timing..... I know some of the truck owners call this a Death Flash....

 

well ill try a different brand of gas next fill up and see if that is the issue. if not then, whats involved in doing this gasket?

 

does have over 100,000, ive used the engine restore before on anther car and had good luck with it, but then also used it on another car and had bad luck. so i dont know.

 

ive been thinking of doing a stat swap so ill probably do that, but also will try the colder plug if nothing else helps or i dont find i have a gasket leak.

 

Removing the intake manifold, thats what takes to replace the gaskets.

 

alright yeah...i got that much...guess it was kind of a dumb question.

what gaskets though, the actual intake to head contact gaskets or is there another gasket that were talking about?