Hey guys, just picked up my first Triton powered vehicle. 2001 F350 4x4 V10 with under a hundred thousand miles and in very nice all original condition. It has a weird and very hacky repair i am correcting but am just doing some homework before i bust into it. At some point it broke the first exh manifold stud on the very forward end of the drivers side head and their work around was to make some kinda clamp/bar to put pressure on the manifolds flange. Its leaking a small bit of oil on the exhaust and i need to fix it, for now it does not have any exhaust leaks (believe it or not) my question is it looks like they ran the big bolt pictured into an existing feature on the head. What, if anything, normally goes in that hole? Is there an oil passage they may have nicked? Thanks all!

 

Appears to be a dead hole ,as you can see the boss behind that bolt with your valve cover off.
do not use a cork gasket replacement, find the silicone metal sandwich gasket .

 

some body sure didn't want to take the time to properly drill out and replace that stud, lots of rube goldberg work studs reusing the VC gasket using blue silicone looking at the other studs when you get into it, more are going to be problems

 

boy aint that the truth.

so i had some time yesterday to bust into it a bit. Started by pulling valve cover to verify the big bolt was not drilled through, which it was not, the big bolt appeared to be in an un used accessory hole. After seeing that i took a deep breath and broke it free. What i found was the manifolds stud at the very front must have broke and, as you suggested, was misdrilled. The hole had some silicon in it but after poking it with a small drill it seems to have been chewed out a bit and the oil was coming out of the stud so they must have nicked a passage. i couldnt tell if any of the stud was still there and it felt like the hole was offset and non consistent, like if someone that didnt know what they were doing let it walk off into the aluminum lol (thats gonna be fun)

hate to admit it but i dont have the time right now to do a proper repair and at some point soon its getting new Banks manifolds (or something like that). Im not proud of my next move but i just refined the fit of the "rube goldberg" ish flat bar stock thing and stuck a piece of high temp silicon round stock i had and cranked her back down. It actually works and the bolt puts a good amount of direct linear pressure on the flange and after a hundred or so miles today not a drop. It should be good till spring and worst case it will just drip on the exhaust allerting me that it failed lol.

 

with what you wrote,i would be preparing to install a time sert thread repair plug ,that would let you install what looks more like a spark plug repair , if you can find them use the ones for blind bottom that would keep the oil inside the head better

 

thanks, im preparing for the worst. For now though its holding pretty good and i really like this truck over either of the diesels i had (7.3 and a 6.0).