I'm tired of the oil leaks.

The oil pump leaks, the turbo drain leaks,..the side cover leaks...maybe even the rear main seal leaks..

I decided that I was gonna fix that. And that required that I tear into it to fix it.

First thing first,...the damn 700.00 oil pump is going back to get the leaks re-sealed:


Then I tore the intake, and exhaust manifolds off.




I thought that I had an exhaust leak somewhere in the engine compartment, because I come out of the car smelling like exhaust after a drive, but didn't find any evidence of it when I removed the hot side from the engine. I didn't know that the turbo drain was leaking. Maybe the oil burning on the manifold was what I was smelling then?


Then there's a wierdness w/ regard to the exhaust manifold. Divided into two separate banks of 3 cylinders to feed my twin scroll turbo,..the front 3 cylinders weren't coloring the plenum the same as the back 3..


Now I discovered that before I removed the exhaust manifold, and I was expecting to see one or more exhaust ports equally light colored, also expecting to find that water had gotten into the exhaust ports or something,...but after removing the heavy assed thing found all six ports exactly the same color.....so,....WTF?

And That brings me around to the title of the thread,.....

Now that it's this far torn down, I'm just gonna strip the engine of all bolted on stuff, and paint the thing satin black. The Orange just is too "SBC" for me even considering that the color is actually Chrysler Hemi Orange. Especially now that the top half of the engine is satin/wrinkle black already. So........Vader. The engine compartment, and all of the original detail has gotten dirty as a result of the dust from the body work, and fouled because of all of the oil,...so no time like the present to fix it.

The oil pump will probably take two weeks to turn around and get back to me, so I figure that I got that much time to get the rest of the engine back to a ready state. The side cover is leaking because I used a cork gasket between the plate and the gasket...That will be remedied w/ straight RTV this time.