So I don't get to work on this thing everyday but when I do, I feel like I get A LOT done.
Today I started out by painting a few things. I was told the head would get surface rust after being hot tanked (I don't really know about that) but for good measure I put a couple coats of high temp paint on it.... along with my water pump, exhaust/intake manifold, and valve cover.
Here you can see the drilled and tapped oil gallery NPT plug.
Here's a good picture of the finish (corner of the intake manifold)
After I got all of that cooking I started to tear in on my steering pump rebuild. Fairly straight forward but I have a few left over parts that came with the rebuild kit and I could find no place for them to go. I am doing a writeup on the rebuild process and posting it on IH8MUD.com.
Put it all back together and BLING-ified it.
I got my oil pan all RTV'ed and gasketed up and mounted that back on the block. Hopefully that doesn't leak again because there are 24 bolts on the pan and 5 on the bellhousing dust cover... not fun to mess with all of those bolts.
After that I got the inspection cover also RTV'ed and gasketed and reinstalled it. No pics of that as it's not very exciting.
I also made a couple of plates for my EGR cooler blockoff and the PCV blockoff. I know blocking off the PCV isn't the best idea as it will cause acidity in the crankcase but it will still be vented. I still need to find gaskets for both of these; I thought they would've been included with the head gasket kit as you have to take BOTH of those things off to remove the head but I guess not.
Here is probably the BEST mod of the day... maybe even the century. Every so often an automotive invention comes along that changes the way we look at modification, driveability, babies, Luxembourg and other things that are also somewhat important. I present to you.... THE 7 DOLLAR SUPER TECHNICAL GYMKHANA APPROVED, AUTOBAHN TESTED, HARBOR FREIGHT PEDAL SET!!! I don't know how many more horses this gave me (thinking somewhere in the 70-80 range) but it cannot be fooled with.