lelandEOD
SILVER Star
For those who might be interested I thought I would document the my process to swap the valve guide seals in situ.
A little background: I just picked up this truck about a month ago and although it passed a combustion leak test and the compression and leakdown numbers looked pretty good, it was suffering from a significant blue cloud of smoke on cold start. I decided since I’m not entirely sure where I wanna go with the engine I just needed to buy myself some time. To that end, I decided to swap the valve stem seals with the head in place and see if that corrected the problem.
The process to strip the valve train has been well documented so I’ll skip to the point where the camshafts have been removed.
I decided to start with cylinder 1 since it’s the easiest to manage. I put a 30 mm socket and breaker bar on the crankshaft nut to keep the engine from spinning and used a Snap-On leak down tester to charge the cylinder with 120 pounds. Then, all I had to do was whack my valve spring removal tool and the valve spring assembly came apart flawlessly.
Here’s where things begin to get a little interesting. I first had to form my own valve stem seal removal tool since I couldn’t find anything on the shelf in any of my local parts stores. I took an old screwdriver and, using a MAP torch, bent the tip over to 90°. I shaped it with a flapper disk to the correct size needed to drop it into the valve spring bore and slip the tip underneath the edge of the seal assembly.
Every single one of the valve seal were completely degraded and the rubber had turned into some sort of brittle plastic. I carefully worked each seal off of the guide and began playing Operation with tweezers to pick out all of the residual fragments left behind.
A little background: I just picked up this truck about a month ago and although it passed a combustion leak test and the compression and leakdown numbers looked pretty good, it was suffering from a significant blue cloud of smoke on cold start. I decided since I’m not entirely sure where I wanna go with the engine I just needed to buy myself some time. To that end, I decided to swap the valve stem seals with the head in place and see if that corrected the problem.
The process to strip the valve train has been well documented so I’ll skip to the point where the camshafts have been removed.
I decided to start with cylinder 1 since it’s the easiest to manage. I put a 30 mm socket and breaker bar on the crankshaft nut to keep the engine from spinning and used a Snap-On leak down tester to charge the cylinder with 120 pounds. Then, all I had to do was whack my valve spring removal tool and the valve spring assembly came apart flawlessly.
Here’s where things begin to get a little interesting. I first had to form my own valve stem seal removal tool since I couldn’t find anything on the shelf in any of my local parts stores. I took an old screwdriver and, using a MAP torch, bent the tip over to 90°. I shaped it with a flapper disk to the correct size needed to drop it into the valve spring bore and slip the tip underneath the edge of the seal assembly.
Every single one of the valve seal were completely degraded and the rubber had turned into some sort of brittle plastic. I carefully worked each seal off of the guide and began playing Operation with tweezers to pick out all of the residual fragments left behind.