Got the head on and the engine sealed up today. Everything went without a hitch -- planning pays off! Duh, you can't drop the head on hte engine with studs on -- I was worried about the back of the engine (firewall) but forgot the front! The thermostat pod hits the fender brace. No big deal, only a minor PITA. I did final head install with the crane -- I didn't want the head sliding on the gasket so I dropped it down square and flat and one-time. I had to diddle in a stud each end with the head 1" off the block. Would have been impossible to do by hand. Two coats of Permatex Copper aerosol on the headgasket, let it dry almost completely. I manually put a very thin coat on the trouble areas (the 3/16" wide seal sections near the steam holes, and #6 back bolt hole. A thin bead of Right Stuff on the oil side, shouldn't affect torquing, it's inches from the nearest bolt hole (probably why they leak so much there). Right Stuff on the intake trough plate. I'm so glad I decided to forgo the crappy old-fashioned gasket set. I needed only three gaskets: oil pump base (hand cut), oil pump cover (came with oil pump kit) and carb adapter to trough plate (occasional removal, else I'd goop it on). The head torquing business was trivial and dull, just like it should be. I did measure stretch on two studs with a dial indicator: 0.012" stretch at 75 ft/lbs. Checked two studs only. My weird-looking middle exhaust port mod prevented the exhaust manifold from going on with studs in place. I hadn't checked that on the bench! No big deal, I'll use stainless steel bolts and nickel anti-seize. I think I'll drill a 1/8" hole in them in cast I later have to extract them. But I'm in the home stretch; it means that all my mods and improvements all worked out statically. I have a lot of trivia still, but I probably can start it by next weekend. Started munging the photos for the website, not up yet though. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://list.amc-list.com/pipermail/amc-list-amc-list.com/attachments/20100410/39da7ed4/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ AMC-list mailing list AMC-list@xxxxxxxxxxxx http://list.amc-list.com/listinfo.cgi/amc-list-amc-list.com