Car running again

[iani]

Thanks to the herculean efforts of DaveB I got my car running again yesterday. We swapped the water pump out last weekend, the job went easily enough and the new pump went in with the medium gasket, the previous pump had only used the thinnest one. We then had a major struggle to refit the inlet manifold, the first set of gaskets seemed quite thick so a set of payen ones was ordered and after relieving all the mounting holes we finally got the inlet manifold fitted. Some of the bolt holes had been previously helicoiled, it looks like a couple were slightly off true and this didn't help with the refitting, it really was a pig of a job. I took the car to Gaydon today to give it a good test, c. 130 mile round trip, temp sat steady at 90C on the Motorway at the limit. My thanks yet again to DaveB for helping me out.

Ian

[DaveB]

A pleasure to help Ian, I knew we'd get there in the end ,
Cheers,
D

[bunny]

Nice one
vince

[V Mad]

I have just been through that myself Ian. I found that refitting the inlet manifold with Helicoiled threads is tricky. When the bolts were offered up, and they were slightly off centre the sharp end of the Helicol digs into the bolt thread. I found that grinding the bolt end to a slight taper helped start the threads.

[iani]

I have just been through that myself Ian. I found that refitting the inlet manifold with Helicoiled threads is tricky. When the bolts were offered up, and they were slightly off centre the sharp end of the Helicol digs into the bolt thread. I found that grinding the bolt end to a slight taper helped start the threads.

Dave had tried grinding the end of the most problematic bolt but it didn't help unfortunately. This was a fairly soul destroying job, I had visions of the car being off the road for a long time as I saved for an engine swap.