achris
More fish than mountain goat
- Joined
- May 19, 2004
- Messages
- 27,468
Hello all,
I thought I would share something I found tonight. Over the weekend I was out on the boat, and ran about 60 nautical miles, around 3 hours on the engine. When I got home and did an engine check I found a very slight salt line on the port exhaust manifold, emanating from the elbow gasket.
As the weather is a little cooler tonight (only 25C at the moment, was high of 32C today, but very humid), I decided to pull the elbow and replace the gasket. Part of any work I do involves an analysis of the failure. What I found was this....
A quick look was all that I needed to understand the reason... We old wrenches just love pullin' on bolts, and it's common practice to give bolts like exhaust manifolds, intake manifolds and those sorts of things a bit of a 'tweak' when we're doing a service. Just to be sure.... Well, it's not such a good idea on these puppies. The book torque is 45lb-ft, and I used a torque wrench when I put the new gasket on!!! If the bolts are over tightened, the elbow will crush the rubber water seal rings, and guess what... they don't seal the water in any more....
That's it folks, just for information....
Chris........
I thought I would share something I found tonight. Over the weekend I was out on the boat, and ran about 60 nautical miles, around 3 hours on the engine. When I got home and did an engine check I found a very slight salt line on the port exhaust manifold, emanating from the elbow gasket.
As the weather is a little cooler tonight (only 25C at the moment, was high of 32C today, but very humid), I decided to pull the elbow and replace the gasket. Part of any work I do involves an analysis of the failure. What I found was this....
A quick look was all that I needed to understand the reason... We old wrenches just love pullin' on bolts, and it's common practice to give bolts like exhaust manifolds, intake manifolds and those sorts of things a bit of a 'tweak' when we're doing a service. Just to be sure.... Well, it's not such a good idea on these puppies. The book torque is 45lb-ft, and I used a torque wrench when I put the new gasket on!!! If the bolts are over tightened, the elbow will crush the rubber water seal rings, and guess what... they don't seal the water in any more....
That's it folks, just for information....
Chris........
