travis' brain dump

well, so far so good…

got home wednesday and started taking the engine apart to put the new head gasket on. i got pretty far on it actually… thanks to mike for helping out those last couple of hours, it made a world of difference. within 5 hours i got everything pulled off the engine (intake, alternator, intercooler piping, turbo, manifold, fuel rail, injectors, wiring, cam shafts, etc) and got the head pulled. Mike and I decided it would be best to go ahead and replace the head gasket and the head that night so we went ahead and got that completed. thursday morning was pretty good… woke up at like 9 and got arwen and i some breakfast… i muddled around for an hour or so and finally went out to get the thing completed. it was a good thing i called up monkey wrench to find out what those ARP studs were supposed to be torqued to… mike and i did them to stock specs the night before and well… 36 ft-lbs is great for stock bolts, but terrible for ARP bolts. those were supposed to be at 60! o.O so at least that got done. started at about 11 and i seriously thought i’d never be done putting crap back on my car, lol. i think the longest time was getting the cams back in and timed up, but overall that was pretty easy. after everything was on the car, i wsa able to test crank it at 3. everything seemed ok, aside from one little bonehead move i made but we won’t talk about that… it was petty.. *cough* anyway i proceeded with the cooling system flush which took another hour or so.. yay fun for that. once i got it all flushed out i let the car run for about 20 minutes while i got the coolant added and all that good stuff. mark came over to watch arwen for me while i took back a torque wrench that i bought from sears the night before… oh yeah, that thing sucked! i set it for the stock torque setting for the cam-bearing bolts and the frackin thing broke two of em! WEAK! anyway, the test drive went well… got about 10 miles on it with no overheating so it looked pretty good. drove it to work today and all seems well. hopefully it will remain that way. lol