Thursday, April 7, 2011

Head Gasket / Top End Rebuild - Day 1

Finally after 6 months of subzero temperatures, today was the first day it was actually warm enough to go outside and do anything on the cars. The poor 560 needs a new head gasket. With only 60k miles on it its rather sad that I have to rebuild the top end just because of the head gasket, but whatcha gonna do?

Spent about 2 hours on it today. Didn't really get far. My back and knees were killing me because of the way I was standing hunched over the car. I think its because the engine is far into the middle of the car and the car is fairly low. Anyhow, today I managed to drain the coolant, removed the spark plug wires, removed the air box and loosened up a few of the petrol lines. While taking off one of the bigger lines going into the fuel distributor I didn't notice the pipe twisting while I was unscrewing it. I'll have to replace it now. No biggie. Will need to buy another 17mm spanner to hold the other end of the lines when loosening them.

I noticed that there was red paint put on some of the bolt heads and fittings. This is a little worrying since I didn't expect anyone to have gone into the engine yet. What does it mean? I know some mechanics do things like that when they strip the bolt. They mark it with paint so they know the next time they go in that the bolt is stripped. So far it seems to be only the intake manifold bolts that have the red paint and one of the lines going into the fuel distributor. I removed one of the red painted bolts and it looked OK to me. I wonder. (UPDATE: The painted marks are done by machines during the manufacturing process to signal the end of a particular program).

All the vacuum lines were pretty brittle and will require renewing. Some of the thermo vacuum-switches snapped off while removing the vacuum lines so they will require renewing as well. Not sure exactly what the switches are for but I should be able to figure that out soon enough.

I'm going to need part numbers for all these things. Anyone have an illustrated PDF parts catalogue they wanna send me?










1 comment:

  1. I realize this is over a year ago, but I thought I might answer a couple of questions:

    The red paint should be factory on this engine, it tells you that the bolt, and or fitting hasn't been removed. One way for the dealer to know if something has been monkeyed with in case of a warranty claim.

    In the future, I recommend jacking up the car and placing it on jackstands when doing extensive engine bay work. Even though you may have no need to get under the vehicle, it saves your back and knees, also makes that dropped nut, bolt, or tool much easier to retrieve.

    I did a complete rebuild on my 190E 2.3 a couple of years ago and am getting ready to do the timing chain and rails on my 91 420 SEL. I am enjoying your blog.

    Landscape

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