What did you do with your Thunderbird Today?

I went out and started pulling the fuel rail off Lazarus, I'm swapping it to the red car due to dirt dobbers, lol. I'll clean the rail and use it on lazarus when I get it back together.
If I pull the bolts up, will the heads and manifold come off in one piece? They're kinda glued together...
 
Grog6 said:
If I pull the bolts up, will the heads and manifold come off in one piece? They're kinda glued together...
Click to expand...

My back is aching on your behalf just at the thought of that.


But no it won’t work, the heads need to clear the dowels which being at a 45° angle means you can’t pull straight up. The other factor is the bolts nearest to the towers cannot be fully removed… this can be overcome with rubber bands or cut hoses to elevate them(which is how you change the heads individually) but all together seems like a recipe for disaster

Why do you want to pull the heads anyway?
 
I'm going to rebuild the engine and heads.
Thought was to lift that off with the engine puller, and cut the rtv on my workbench, rather than in place. I have tungsten wire to cut it with. I need a wire coathanger to feed the wire with. I haven't seen one since the 80's, lol.
I'm kinda glad it wont work, pulling the fuel rail was bad enough.
Are there any projections on the head/manifold joint? All I remember was the plastic tabs on the gasket. The wire will cut plastic.
 
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How much RTV did you use? If it’s just the dab for a PI swap you should have little resistance getting the manifold off the heads
 
Well, it was badly pitted when I broke the og manifold, so i converted to the pi manifold to avoid the og gasket outline, that was deeply pitted. I filled the pits smooth, let it dry, and set the gaskets into a layer of black rtv, on both sides. It never leaked again. Almost 500kmi. There's enough rtv it should cut ok. :)
Yeah, that was a bush fix from hell.
 
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