what happens after you pay off your car?

[87IROC Z]

everything starts going bad. along with a strut bearing plate blowing up on me over the weekend my intake is leaking coolant into the oil. shop wants about $900 to replace the gasket, oil, coolant, and new plugs & wires for the hell of it. No way im paying that much. I know matt had a late model pontiac. Any idea if the intakes on these cars are easy enough to do on my own?

[Ragtop89]

Yup. Same shit happened to me.
As soon as I paid it off stuff started going bad . . .

[Mkos1980]

Josh, they are very easy to do. I did the 3800 Series II on my older GP GT. It went bad at 45K. If you want it done by a professional. My neighbor will do it. Hes a GM tech for haleen and fixes all my stuff I break. Hes TOP NOTCH. We had my dads Z71 intake gaskets go and it was about 235 total installed. I would have done it but it was when it was like 0 outside.

[87IROC Z]

Yeah, i found a step by step on how to do it. Looks pretty straight forward. Apparently this is a really common problem with pontiacs too. My dad and I are going to tackle it once i get the car back. Im having them fix the strut issue first.

[chainsaw]

very common problem on 3.1 gm small cars. fairly easy to do, too :)

[91LT1Formula]

Very easy especially if you have air tools maybe a couple hrs.

[87IROC Z]

Im picking up the car tonight from the shop. My dad and i will get started on it and hopefully get it all torn down. Ill be out of town saturday, so i should be able to finish it up sunday morning.

[Mkos1980]

Josh, You will find it easier then you think. I bet 4 hours tops

[87IROC Z]

Yeah, thats what im thinking. Im not too worried about it.

[87IROC Z]

we ran into a couple snags, nothing major though. Id say we have about 6 hours into it and are almost finished. We would have finished yesterday but we were getting tired and started making stupid mistakes so we called it a day. It should be done tonight, probably only an hour or so of work left.

[87IROC Z]

All finished, car runs much better now. the intake leak was really bad. i forgot to take pics but ive never seen a leak and buildup like that before.

[Mkos1980]

Very Nice. Run some Mobil 1 in there to clean it out a little.

[87IROC Z]

yeah, i already did 2 oil changes since monday. it should be pretty well cleaned out now.

[Mkos1980]

My intake leak was so bad I went though a gallon of it in 1 day. The lifters were sooooo loud as they tried to get pumped up with dexcool rather then oil. New intake gaskets, new plenum for good measure and a new set of Comp Roller lifters and she was all better.

[87IROC Z]

wow, thats really bad. you should have seen the solidified chunks of dexcool/oil that were plugging some of the coolant chambers in the heads.

[Mkos1980]

wow, thats really bad. you should have seen the solidified chunks of dexcool/oil that were plugging some of the coolant chambers in the heads.


LOL Been there. I pulled the intake and said Dayum some of these ports are not cross overs. Yea right, until I poked though with a screwdriver lol. I then converted the car to regular green antifreeze after a nice full flushout with CLR lol. Car accually had more heat in the winter and cooled better in the summer. Even ran cooler. We converted my dads 98 Z71 over to Green too because after the 2nd intake leak at 120K I said screw it. We also had the same good results with the green and the truck.

Since my truck is running Yellow antifreeze, I had no idea what the hell that stuff is lol.

[azrael91966669]

took me 2 hours to do the full job the dex cool coolant eats the gaskets up gm would rather the gaskets get eat then metal so you end up with leaking/blown gaskets around 80-120 depends some happen at 30 k lol besides then they can charge an arm and a leg to replace them

[87IROC Z]

damn, i dont know how you did that in only 2 hours. It took us that long to get it all stripped down.

[chainsaw]

2 hours? wow. you must work really fast. :)

the labor book allows anywhere from 5 to 6 1/2 hours labor to do intake gaskets on a gm 3.1 or 3.4 engine.

two hours of that alone is spent cleaning off gasket mating surfaces.

josh, did you use the stock replacement gaskets, or did you buy a better set? fel-pro has a metal backed set that is a lot more resiliant to the chemicals in dexcool. MS98003T is the number for the new set.

[azrael91966669]

aputty knife and solvent maybe 10 min worth of cleaning 2 hours way to long
15 if you also clean out the intake passages with a fishtank brush

once these cars are out ofwarrenty stop useing dex cool and then this problem never happens again
the protectant in it dose more damage to rubber and mainly rubber

just because to pay a shop to for something that takes 6 hours dosnt mean it takes that long normaly there done in half that your car gets parked out back of the shop or if your a waiter your car stays in the shop with the hood up so you think its being worked on

really funny for when it takes 20 mins but getting paid for a 2 hour job cause the tech knows a fast way to do it
when your at a shop thats closeing and you dont have much to do you learn ways of doing things like flat rate do

[87IROC Z]

id say total it took us about 6 hours. it was also my first time doing this kind of work on a newer car.

rob, i replaced them with fel-pro gaskets. They were stock replacements though. Im not planning on keeping this car any longer that i really have to. Joelle's car is paid off in 2 years, so once thats done ill be looking for something new.