I tend to do my best diagnostic work over the long haul. About three winters ago, the Exploder began to produce a little ticking noise. Not unheard of, and not uncommon. My first thought was to yank a head and see fi I had a sticky lifter- a very common thing on older 302 V-8 engines, and this one is sporting 260,000 miles. <\/p>\n
Today, obsessing a bit over whether I should try to rip this lifter out and replace it before going to Dallas, or see how it fares during the trip, I had an interesting thought. <\/p>\n
I had been under the truck yesterday, doing a trans filter change. A pain, but worth doing on a truck that old. And while I was down there, I noticed the headpipe on the driver’s side was clean. Not “new” clean but abnormally hot clean- like it’s had a lot of heat. <\/p>\n
So tonight I scoot back under (amazing how easy this is, when you don’t have an extra spare tire!) and look at that joint. I can slip the tip of my knife blade into the joint. <\/p>\n
So I spray a little penetrant on the bolt, and unscrew it. <\/p>\n
Now, most may not have any idea of the import of that statement. Let me repeat: I sprayed a little penetrant on an EXHAUST BOLT, and then UNSCREWED IT. <\/p>\n
mechanics among you will marvel at that statement. For the rest, unscrewing an exhaust system bolt on a 9 year old truck with 261,000 miles on it is IMPOSSIBLE. it has NEVER HAPPENED. <\/p>\n
until today.<\/p>\n
So I took it out, ran the threads with a die, anti-seized the bejus out of it, and ran it back in.<\/p>\n
And my rattle almost disapeared. <\/p>\n
I still have to do the OTHER bolt, but I will get to it when I can. <\/p>\n
Just knowing that it’s not a lifter rattling around in there waiting to fail is a godsend. It makes me feel 100% better about the trip. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I tend to do my best diagnostic work over the long haul. About three winters ago, the Exploder began to produce a little ticking noise. Not unheard of, and not uncommon. My first thought was to yank a head and see fi I had a sticky lifter- a very common thing on older 302 V-8 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shadetree-mechanic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1536"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1536\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}