well guys, last night I swapped my cap and rotor over to the Accel parts and apparently my old cap & rotor were toast. power came back pretty good. I mentioned that I was going to do a mpg test on these new Rhoads lifters and last night I did the before test and it came back with 14.03 mpg. what I did was I filled it up, jumped on the hiway for about 17 miles and turned around and went back to the same station and filled it back up, total mileage was about 34 miles and I was able to do a constant 70 mph 90% of the loop. so I figure that next week sometime after the comp does it's re-learn, I'll do the same loop and re-measure the mpg.

if I can find my vacuum guage, I'm gonna measure the manifold vacuum tonight and record before and after #'s on that too.

a couple of things that suck here is last night I found a pool of oil on the bottom of the plenum... this is most likely the cause of my pinging problem that has been getting worse. so there are 3 things happening this weekend, the lifter install of course, the swapping of the intake manifold to a stock one and fixing the plenum in the process. I do know that a leaky plenum gasket will cause a loss in mpg so that also has to be considered when all of this is done...

so if your interested, stay tuned to this post as I'll update it as I go...

 

update... lifters are in, a slight PITA on the removal of the old ones... the end lifters require the head gasket be cut for clearance. sucks but had to be done. the new lifters are slightly shorter in height and were a snap to put in. the adjustment was pretty straigt forward and they give options to reduce the chatter at idle. I opted for the standard install (valve lash set @ .020").

that was the good news...

the bad news is when I was working on the new manifold, I torqued down the t-stat housing with a ft-lb torque wrench, then went and grabed the in-lb torque wrench for the plenum plate. I ended up setting it down on a bench, then went into the house to get the bolt sequence and came out and grabbed the wrong wrench. needless to say, I have a busted bolt to remove. doh!

oh well, it was almost time to quit anyway... hockey is on.

 

man... just reading "busted bolt" gives me the shivers again from my header install.... hope everything goes well steve... hockey huh? whos your team? die hard sabres fan!!!!!!!!!

 

You should have had your son sitting under the hood again holding your tools. lol...

see ya

 

how is his head doin anyway? any sighns of permanant damage from the header?

 

lol, nope no permanat damage from the header incident. he opted to bail this time around.

the bolt came right out, i did have a problem with the new intake TB bolt holes however, they needed to be cleaned up since the bolts wouldnt go in very far. that also slowed me down a bit chasing down the tap.

I am a die-hard Sharks fan, we lost saturday night after winning 5 in a row, 4 of those we either won or tied in the last seconds of the game and won it in ot. fun stuff, I'm warming up to these new rules.

anyways as for the lifters, they're in and the truck is back together. however I'm not sure the lifters are performing as advertised... the clatter never goes away once the motor comes off idle (lifters arent pumping up). I made sure the orientation was correct to so I'll have to e-mail them and find out what the deal is with them.