APR recommends leaving all bolts tight, and replacing them one at a time cranking them up to full torque immediately? Really? Wow. It does give me the warp-the-head-heebie-jeebies, but it would also keep the head gasket from walking around I guess...
So I tried replacing all the head bolts, but no joy, still leaked. So off came the head, wow, amazingly simple, gotta love a non-turbo Diesel when you have to work on it.
Just FYI the old bolts just "popped" and then unthreaded by hand. The new ones, after fully torquing, when I removed them there was a good full turn of tension before they were hand unscrewable. Hence I'm thinking the old bolts were re-used ones and not fresh. Now I gotta go buy 10 more... :roll:
I measured the piston height above the deck at TDC, and it's .03 inches, which means the thin single notch head gasket right? Any chance the head in a prior life might have been resurfaced enough to require a thicker gasket? The old one was a 3 notch which is what makes me wonder...
Last question...the valve cover gasket is supposedly single use according to the manual. However, to torque the head bolts I'm supposed to warm it up, then torque another 1/4th a turn, and then wait 1K miles and again torque it another 1/4th turn. Is the valve cover gasket going to hold up to all this or should I put yet another new gasket on after the 1K mile torquing is done?
Thanks for the help all!
Just had the head inspected, flat as a board and looks like it was a new head not long ago. It's looking more and more like they reused the head bolts so there wasn't enough tension on the gasket. I'll try to find a small straight edge to inspect the block's deck and make sure it's also happy before putting it all back together again.
Last question...the valve cover gasket is supposedly single use according to the manual. However, to torque the head bolts I'm supposed to warm it up, then torque another 1/4th a turn, and then wait 1K miles and again torque it another 1/4th turn. Is the valve cover gasket going to hold up to all this or should I put yet another new gasket on after the 1K mile torquing is done?
You need this gasket:
http://www.germanautoparts.com/Volkswagen/Golf/Engine/102/1It's the second one, rubber, re-usable and less prone to leaking than a 3 piece cork gasket.
So the head install went fine and the car is running great. I just finished ticking off the first 1K miles and was going to add the final 1/4th turn today but just had this happen on the 2nd bolt!
Doh!!! It is REALLY freaking hard to turn the buggers, should I be doing this with the engine warm maybe or something like that? Off to Kraken to replace the tool, it'll be amusing to see what they say... :wink:
I ended up just finishing it cold, would have been too much of a pain to button things back up enough to run it. Kragen replaced the broken tool, but also I got a similar tool but much shorter, so there was less flex and less angle as I leaned into the breaker bar. Worked just fine, all done. Off for a test drive... Thanks Andrew.