Yeah I know, Glenn. haha. It will give you a headache after a while. But it does work very well.

 

I have to admit, I did like the smell after my first use today. I'll be breathing it all day tomorrow or sat, though so I'm sure the novelty will wear off...

Any other opinions on the heat the manifold vs heat the bolt question?

 

I don't know that where you heat really matters that much, just so you get it good and hot.

 

You're prob right. Wherever it expands will hopefully break up some rust!

 

Exactly...

 

Not sure of the temp rating but it was engine paint.

When I spray that stuff, its the last thing I do for the day. Spray and run for the house, LOL

 

If you do have to use a torch to heat the bolts or manifold, whichever, I would let them cool before trying to turn them. Sometimes when you try to turn a bolt right after heating with a torch, it will gall the threads. If you let it cool almost completely it will shrink and be much easier to come out.

 

If you like gray, this is what I got from Autozone.

 

I do like that paint - looks good on the valve covers as well. and its held up on those locations well enough so far? my neighbor has an old Ford 9N tractor, and the color looks the same. I think I may be decided.

I'm sure i'll change my mind between now and paint time, but maybe i'll do grey on the block and valve covers, and black on the heads and IC pipes. break each one up a bit. then, I can use black high temp on the manifolds and it'll blend right in with the heads.

NOTED! makes sense. I was kind of worried about putting the wrench on the red hot bolt head and turning, thinking the softened metal would just be more likely to round over then - didn't think of galling in the heads, but that makes sense. and the threads in the head were definitely NOT the problem on the other manifold, no sense in making matters worse this time around.

I think i'll try the front and back ones again (least rusted) after some good shocking and the kroil treatment. if they seam significantly easier than the other side, i'll move to the inner bolts without heat. if they're just as bad or worse than the other side, the torch'll come out!

 

the other method that I have used that works really good is to heat it up just below glowing (hotter than propane) and hit it with candle wax. the melted wax will creep into just about every crevice and when it cools it expands and acts like a lubricant.

whatch out as there is usually a bit of flame from the wax involved.

richard

 

I remember a wire wheel being my best friend when I was prepping everything I thought my compressor was going to give up on me. I didn't remove my exhaust manifolds was afraid id break every bolt haha. Wire wheel and about 20 cans of brake clean and it was ready for paint

 

Well that was a frustrating afternoon. Barely any positive progress at all and 4 hours very nearly wasted.

The front and back bolts on the DS manifold loosened no problem. The inner ones wouldn't budge worth a darn! They were soaked with kroil for ~ 2 days, shocked real good with the single jack hammer, and still just rounded over with every socket and bolt extractor I tried. Even getting one of the bolts heads and surrounding nearly red hot with the acetylene torch and quenching with oil (didn't have any candle wax handy) didn't make a difference.

I was pretty frustrated, so took a break there and went to work with the drill bits and easy outs on the one remaining busted off bolt on the PS. The first size easy out I tried didn't budge it and I was afraid to break it off, so I went up to the next bigger size. Yup. Busted it off! *****!!!

I was able to break it into pieces though and get it mostly out. I guess my last resort is to drill it out to the body diameter and try to rechase the M10 threads. That should be fun.

Then before cutting all the bolts on the DS manifold, I though, let my try to drive out the the bolt heads in the PS manifold I removed last week. It too ALOT of hammering on what looked like was the least-seized one. Once it came out, I realized that a cone of manifold iron came out with the bolt, welded to the underside of the head. I'll try to post a pic here, but not sure if I can do so from the phone. Basically, though, I'd say this manifold is shot. There's no way a new bolt will sit right in that hole. And I couldn't even get the next bolt to budge. If it did go, I'm sure it's hole would be worse than the first one.

Soooo, I haven't cut the DS manifold off yet, thinking I'll just leave it and try to buy just a new PS manifold. Hopefully they don't only come in pairs. Sucks that it'll def be a couple hundred bucks i wasn't planning on.

After all that bad luck, I yanked the harmonic balancer off and called it a day. Of course my harbor freight impact gun was too weak to spin in off, so I had to monkey around with a tire iron in the flex plate. At least I'll be replacing it with a SMF, so don't really care if it's buggered.

Hopefully I'll have better luck tomorrow - or next weekend, whenever I'm able to work on it next.

Ugh.

 

No pics from the phone app, I guess. Another failure today! :-)

 

Whew, that's rough. Better luck next time, lol. Sorry it's giving you such trouble JP.

 

That does suck JP. But, think of it this way, you're having bad luck with them bolts, but if you wouldn't have done this now, you would have had to tackle them sometime in the truck after install once leaks developed. That would have really sucked. Best to get as much of that kind of pain in the a$$ stuff done while its on the stand.

I'm trying to think positive for you! You'll get it done.