Dinged Up-date

It's been a busy few weeks for the Dinged Up Dodge.  It started with the whole cam sensor thing where I took apart a perfectly good running car for no other reason than to test a theory.  While playing around with the cam sensor, I discovered something much more potentially disastrous than a cam sensor that might some day go bad.  I had an intake leak.

Intake leaks are actually pretty easy to check for.  First, I heard some hissing from the middle of the intake in addition to the throttle body hiss.  Then, I sprayed the seam between the intake and the heads with some brake cleaner.  If the engine changes speed when you spray, it's because the brake cleaner is getting sucked into that cylinder.  Anything aerosol will work, the engine will either speed up or slow down, depending on how flammable your spray is.  In my case, the center cylinder on the driver's side was leaking.  There was a very definite RPM change when spraying around that port.  I don't know how long it had been leaking, but it could have lead to a catastrophic failure if it wasn't addressed.

As it turns out, for a huge engine in a small car, the intake comes off surprisingly easy.  The hardest part was actually lifting the intake off the car by myself.  It's not heavy, but it's awkward because you don't have a fender to lean over like you would a regular car.  Here's everything that you need to take off except for the cowl(which comes off with just four screws after the wipers are removed).  The whole intake/injector wiring subassembly just unplugs from the main harness, so even the wiring can stay put.

As soon as I lifted the intake off, I spotted the problem.  The original intake gaskets were cracked.  They didn't tear when I took the intake off, they were already broken.  You can see a chunk of gasket stuck to the center port, the rest stayed on the block.

Here's what the port on the head looked like with the rest of the gasket removed.  You can see the carbon tracks going across it.

The thing is though, it wasn't just on the center cylinder.  Most of the cylinders had similar tracks.  The center cylinder on the driver's side was the only one actively leaking, but any of them could have started leaking at any time.

Thankfully, modern gaskets are generally non-stick, so other than the carbon I didn't have to do much gasket surface scraping to get everything cleaned up.  Also note the rags stuffed in the ports.  It's important to keep crud from falling into the engine.  You don't want to have to pull a head because you accidentally dropped a bolt.

I went with Cometic gaskets instead of factory gaskets.  They are supposed to be the best, and they're actually pretty cheap.  They also are made to go on dry, no silicone like the good old days.  After getting everything bolted back together and torquing the million intake bolts in sequence, it fired right up.  A quick check around the ports with more brake cleaner showed no more leaks, and life is good.