January 7-8, 2006 - More Teardown (3)
While I was busy messing around removing the old exhaust gaskets, my dad was
busy cutting up some sheet metal.
The instructions say to bend
back the material surrounding the radiator support but my Uncle Joe
showed up earlier and mentioned that it would look a lot nice if we
just cut the sheet metal and welded the seam. That seemed like
a great idea at the time. Joe got down on his hands and knees
running his hand along the line he thought we should cut, but he
never actually picked up the cut-off wheel. We figured, what
the hell, it couldn't be that hard to do... snip snip, weld weld and
that should be it.
I finished cleaning up the head before my dad was done cutting up
the sheet metal so we moved on to the header install. Here's a
picture of the driver's side head after I removed the remnants of
the old gasket.
Before we got to installing the turbo headers
I snapped a picture of Uncle Joe (left) and Uncle Ronnie (right) doing what they do
best. To be honest a Saturday spent working on the car
wouldn't be complete without a couple of guys standing around
drinking beer and telling the guys turning the wrenches what they
ought to be doing.
Ah, here comes the first battle with frustration. We thought
the k-member and header install was going to smoothly. Hell,
Tom Berry at
www.turbochargedpower.com said that the k-member only needed to
be modified in some installations. With the heads cleaned off
and everything out of the way we were ready to actually start
installing something. This was an important point in the
installation for more than one reason. We had some options, in
the back of our minds we were thinking about the broken transmission
that needed to be replaced but being the gear heads we are we
decided to start installing the stuff that makes the power.
The headers went on first, we smeared some high-temp Permatex around
the exhaust ports, slapped the headers in place and torqued them
down. The picture below shows how easily the bolts on the
passenger side could be
accessed. There was plenty of room for a universal, sockets,
extensions, and ratchets.
The driver side was almost as easy, there were a few more things
in the way but we worked around them.
Time to install the k-member, no problem right?
