Inlet mani on, I have taped up the holes now to stop anything falling in there.
I could actually drop the motor back in now, but there's a problem. When I stripped it down I noticed the exhaust gaskets has a lot of black on them, showing they were covering the ports by quite a large amount.
A couple of them were actually blowing in the corners
So, as the engine is out and easy to get to, let's see what they are actually covering. I turned the engine over 45 degrees and then using the piece of card the head gaskets came in, I punched out some holes and fitted it over exhaust ports.
Now it's just a matter of cutting out the holes with a craft knife, using the edges of the port as a guide.
Just ease it off, put the new gaskets on and ease it back on so I can see what, and how big the problem is.
Oh dear
I don't know how much difference this would make, but it seems a bit daft to have the heads ported, have a set of tubular manifolds and cover up some of the port.
Difficult to work out how much they are covering the holes in the exhaust manifold as they aren't the best fit. The studs aren't in any way central and the manifold has to be forced on to fit, so it won't work just placing them on the manifold
So, I thought I would just spray some glue onto the card, and fit the manifold to the head, let the glue set and pull the lot off which will show exactly where they fit - easy peasy
Thankfully they were very close - this shows where they sit as opposed to the head, and apart from an overlap of around 2mm on one of them,(which was attacked by a passing Dremel
) none of them are a problem at all.
The head therefore matched the mani very well, lucky considering the lack of centralisation of the studs, but the gaskets are terrible. I know the P6 didn't use gaskets but these are after market manifolds so after some thought, I did decide on using them but they needed to be modified.
I had marked them with a permanent marker when behind the cardboard, and then clamped them between a couple of bits of angle iron to stop them ripping apart when altered with a dremel, just leaving the marked bit sticking out.
Surprisingly easy to trim them up, but it did take a while as there are four of them and three sides had to be done on most of them.
They fit a whole lot better, I have numbered them in case I take them off and get them mixed up, although I doubt it, they can stay there now. I will be looking very carefully at the corners when fitting the manifolds, don't want them blowing again. If they do, I may try it without them or maybe get some material and make a set to fit. Hopefully I won't have to do that.
Right, what's next, oh yes there's two of these so us lucky V8 owners get to do the whole job again on the other side