Intake manifold gasket replacement...special tool?

[Raze]

see post above

[Raze]

see post above

[Pjs]

Originally Posted by Nickcruffin

Here is a tip: While the manifold is still bolted down, remove the throttle body from the intake manifold. You will have to remove it is steps – First remove the mass air flow body, then un bolt the throttle body from the intake manifold. NOTE: you do not need to remove the fuel rail from the Manifold.

This will allow you to remove the intake manifold from the head without having to remove the throttle cable. The throttle cable is a bitch. If you break it you will have to replace the whole thing. Just avoid it and you are golden.

It will save you a lot of aggravation and time.

I've found that much more work is involved in removing the TB from the manifold and it's not really necessary. I had to change my starter a couple months ago (under the manifold). I disconnected the battery, removed the air intake tube, unbolted the 10 manifold studs/bolts. Pulled the fuel rail out of the way (I've got the new SS one) and then lifted the manifold up from the passengers side and held it up with a piece of 1 x 1. The gaskets are fully accessible as is the starter...total time to change was 15 mins.

BTW...if you do break the throttle or cruise cable guides on the TB, depending on how it's broke, there is a way to fix it, I had to do mine and it's been holding for over a year now...saved myself about $480

[powerglide]

Raze, congrats on a great job and the pictures/description/web-site is fantastic! It will be very useful for years to come....too bad it can't be made part of this web-site to ensure it will be up 'forever'.

Couple of questions come to mind.....did you just disconnect the plug wires or actually remove the front 4 plugs? Do you think just re-torquing the bolts would have solved your problems (without doing the whole gasket replacement?)

Thanks for the great report.

[Raze]

Pjs, exactly, it's a real easy fix and removing the TB is not worth it IMO.


Powerglide, yeah just unplug the wires, and no I don't think retorquing the bolts would have been a good idea because after removing the gaskets I found scoring on the aluminum intake around the two intakes on the drivers side closest to the firewall indicating something had gotten between the gasket and intake and rubbed pretty badly. If I had retorqued there'd no guarantee that whatever it was wouldn't have just remained in there and warped the soft sealing gasket inside the hard black shell, continuing my leak. I have since gone through a full thermal cycle and found that the bolts had loosened by about 4 in lbs each and needed retorquing. I will repeat this proccess once more in hopes that the bolts maintain their load. The skipping is gone now which absolutely rocks.

As for the site, I wanted to basically copy what I did there onto these pages but the forum setup for posting pics makes that challenging as I could not annotate the attached pics and I couldn't make sure they were in a specific order as the upload tool just seems to grab them all in a haphazard way.

[eldorado1]

Can anyone confirm the part number is 3537121 and/or the price for the intake manifold gasket? I'm hoping they're cheap, but since it's got cadillac stamped on it...