Jumping in head first.

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slowchevy

eat ass drive fast
Sep 10, 2007
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Last week or so, I began noticing a horrible squeaking/rattling noise in my car. Long story short, I located the noise was due to what is likely a bad lifter at cylinder 4 on the intake valve.

Yesterday, my buddy and I went to a yard about 40 miles away since they have the cleanest 3800s I've seen thus far and tore apart an '04 Monte Carlo SS.. had 100k~ on it and the engine was spotless. We ended up with not only 12 lower mile lifters (to me) but 12 pushrods and two brand new heads. I decided to jump into this head first.

I found out that I can get a gasket kit with everything that's on the top half of the engine so I'm doing upper/lower intake gaskets, exhaust manifold gaskets, head gaskets, and all the other associated stuff.. and this kit also comes with all the new valve seals and all of that so we are doing a minor rebuild on these junkyard heads that were in such good shape that the paint was still on the sides of the heads. Whoever had this car changed the oil every 3k and took care of it. The thing was rear-ended hard and the interior/underhood areas were SPOTLESS. Tells a lot about how a person maintains a car.

Here's how it looked after we were done.

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Here's my buddy tearing down the junkyard heads and bagging/labeling each valve/spring/rocker for each cylinder based on which bank it came from and where it was and so forth.

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Last night, I soaked my new lifters in ATF to clean out any old gunk if there was and the new pushrods in acetone to also do the same. Today, I cleaned them up and put them in a pan filled with Mobil 1. Looks good enough you could put it on pancakes. Nom.

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As we were walking through this yard, I saw something interesting that I've never seen before in a junkyard. a 1998-2002 V6 Firebird. The reason this is interesting is because it's the same engine, but RWD. The main thing I am on about is that they have aluminum valve covers which IMO will help dissipate heat faster than plastic valve covers. Here's how they look. One on top is how I pulled it out, bottom was somewhat wire brushed on my bench grinder.

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I can't say the same for this engine though. The valvecovers were caked with oil.

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Whoever had that car didn't take care of it. That's a half and half shot of clean vs. how I pulled them. Acetone and a stiff brush work wonders on oil I found out. :)

Tear down also began on mine..

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It's a learning experience for me and my buddy has experience doing this with other cars. Win win I think.

Will post as we go along.
 

slowchevy

eat ass drive fast
Sep 10, 2007
24,469
194
Another neat thing is that I needed a few tools for this project I didn't even know we had.. looked around in my dad's box and found what I needed. Hope he's proud that I'm learning this stuff.
 

1quick

TCG Elite Member
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Jan 29, 2008
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coal city
if they are textured I would just wire wheel them, to do a nice polish job you would need to sand that texture smooth then work your way up from your starting grit in 200 grit increments untill you hit 1500ish then put them on a polishing wheel
 
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