1999 Intake gasket and injector replacement

[rlsllc]

My box from Rock Auto came today, and I plan to change the intake gaskets and upgrade to the MPFI injector this weekend. The victim is my wife's 1999 AWD.

I bought the premium Fel-Pro gasket set MS98002T and a Delphi FJ10565 injector.

Although I've done a lot of work on the older engines, including the original "W" CPI motors, I haven't worked on this series engine ('96 and newer) and would like any advice from those who have.

I know to get everything perfectly clean and follow the torque sequence. If there's any other details lets hear them.

Thanks!

[crash]

hey Roy... any chance you could do pics and a step by step on said medical procedure for the rest of us?

thanks
Rob

[rlsllc]

I'll have to bribe my photographer. She may be game since it is her van and she wants to keep an eye on me anyway. I may or may not be into this thing later, I'm getting my wisdom teeth out in a couple of hours, depends on how I feel after that. Could be this weekend.

[astrozam]

I don't have anything specific to that year engine Roy, but I do recommend giving yourself a couple days to do this. Removing the front passenger seat will help give you a place to sit while you work on the engine, vacuum the area around the intake to get out all debris, label everything & take pics, matchmark you're distributor shaft, it takes ( supposedly ) around 24hrs for the intake gasket sealant to fully cure so there is no rushing the job. When I did my 95 I took things apart and labelled everything ( fri night i think ) cleaned up the old gasket material and installed new then buttoned up the intake the next day, finished putting the rest back together the following day then started her up sun evening.

I didn't have A.C to try to work around, so if you have that it may make things a little more difficult.

[LaGrasta]

Being clean is always nice…

My usual cleaning is with a warm engine, spray with Simple Green liberally, wait a few minutes to soak, then hose away the grime. I use brake cleaner for the stubborn stuff.

Do this first and you'll appreciate the cleaner work area.

[LaGrasta]

Oh yeah, use a leaf blower to blast the remaining water out!

[ihatemybike]

Wouldn't you know it, I recently did the same job on Green.

The AC doesn't add much to the job. Remove 3 acces bracket bolts and 1 nut slide forward to gain access to the driver's front intake manifold bolt.

Take your time

PM me if you want my number for phone support.

[Smiliesafari]

Clean, clean, clean. I did that job on the "Smilievan" in two days. Total focus...no interuptions. As Zam said........remove the seats. Both of them. It's only four bolts each. Trust me....you're going to need the room.

[rlsllc]

Thank you all for the replies. I did clean everything as noted, and took some pictures. The lines for te rear a/c weren't as bad as I thought, as Aaron said, the bracket slid forward as described.

The general instruction: Open all doors on the van, remove seats (4 18mm nuts each on the front, my 2nd row buckets have quick release mounts) , dash extension (2 13mm bolts on the bottom and I put 10mm ones in the top sides), dog house (2 13mm and the 2 15mm ones that take 7' of extensions to reach), I will note that the doghose comes off so much nicer without the seats in the van.

Under the hood: If you can see it, you'll be taking it off. Battery cable first! I took off a few extra things since they're a nuisance to work around. I started with the aircleaner (pops off, loosen one clamp), shroud (3 10mm on top and 2 on each side, you need long ext to reach them), belt (3/8 ratchet), fan (2 pair of big channel locks), took out the 2 bottom water pump bolts to drain the motor (14mm), upper rad hose (plyers), tensioner (17mm), unhooked the alternator (2 13 mm, one on the wire stud as a backup and one on the nut, unplugged the reg harness), unbolted a harness from the right side (13mm) and removed the bracket and alt (2 15 mm bolts, 1 15mm nut), removed a bolt (13mm) from beside the A/C compressor, removed the wingnut that holds on the elbow for the intake and then was able to remove the oil filler tube, and pulled A/C and P/S bracket forward (3 15mm bolts, one nut, one 10 mm bolt in a bracket that holds the rear line back on the engine), removed the heater hoses.

Whew! Then on to the engine, several 10 mm nuts and bolts to remove the throttle and cruise cable bracket, slipped the cables off of the throttle body, 14 mm nut to remove the ground lug, unplug, unhook, or remove everything you see. There is a lot of stuff that makes you say "how on earth??? that you just take off one other thing and it is easy to get to, like the coil. 10mm deep is a popular socket. There is an egr pipe that is under the A/C compressor, I squeezed the nut with vicegrips on the 2 of 3 sides I could reach and it came right out. I was shocked by this.

I didn't do much labeling, I am usually pretty lucky in that I remember, things usually only fit one way and have somewhat of a memory (lay back down in place).

I marked the rotor position and pulled the distributor (T20 on the cap and a 13mm wrench on the clamp), unhooked the fuel lines (??? size), took out the 8 13mm (no wonder they leak, lol) bolts and it lifted right out without prying which is a first for me on the dozens of engines I've worked on. I pulled it out from the front since I didn't pull the oil pressure sensor, But I think I'll pull it and put it back in from the rear, inside the van.

The back coolant passages were full of Dexcool gunk, and the back of the gaskets were disintegrated. Scary. I don't know how coolant wasn't getting in the engine. ](*,)

I then disassembled the intake completely and started cleaning. And cleaning. And then I cleaned.

I cleaned the throttle body with carb cleaner, a paper towel, and time. Same on the upper and lower intake, although I was wary of using carb cleaner on the plastic. I put them in my soak tub, which really only made a big mess of the tub.

Carb and brake parts cleaner are my friend, although both taste kinda bad.

I also used my roloc tool (or whatever it is, it's an air angle grinder with cleaning pads) to clean the heads real good. I put an old shirt in the valley, and used air to blow it out and lots on towels and brake parts cleaner.

The felpro package said that the rocker covers had to come off, but mine didn't. The intake cleared. They leak and the package had the gaskets so I pulled them (13mm, 3 or 4 bolts per side, right on top) and cleaned all of that too. They are plastic.

I put the new injector on the intake, that sucked bad. the tubes were stiff and felt like they were kinking up when installed. I really hope they are OK.

I'm going to go see what I can do on it before work, and I'll check back in and post some pics.

[astrozam]

Thatta boy Roy, sounds like you're almost halfway there,LOL

[LaGrasta]

Whew, big job!

[Cobra]

reading that made me so glad that i'm only going to pull my throttle body off this weekend sounds like quiet a task

[rlsllc]

It is all back together now! Here is a link to the pictures: http://s1015.photobucket.com/albums/af2 ... placement/
I did it this way since there are 30 or so pictures. I'll add descriptions today if I have time.

The only problem I encountered was that the distributor didn't line up exactly with the original match mark. I attribute this to the muck thicker gasket raising the assembled height of the intake, thus not allowing the distributor to drop as low into the engine. It seems to run fine so I guess it's OK.

I changed the oils and filled the coolant after letting it sit 30 hours to allow thw RTV at the front and back of the intake to cure. Thanks to Zam for mentioning this, it hadn't crossed my mind.

On a scale of 1-10, I give this a 5-6 in difficulty, and a 7-8 in tediousness. No special tools or skills really needed, just lots of patience. If you can do the cap, rotor and wires, you can do this, IMHO.

[Rileysowner]

I don't know if this is in my ability. I will probably have to do it someday, but I hope that day will be long in coming.

[LaGrasta]

I just looked over your pics, thanks for posting these. I haven't done this repair as just some radiator tablets stopped my leak, over 30k ago.

As I looked at your pics I was noticing the oil build-up, muck and mire. Growing up in Ohio, I know cold weather is harsh on vehicles compared to where I live now, SoCal. After seeing your internals, I'm curious how many miles are on this engine. I have 153k on mine and always have run synthetic at 5k-10k intervals. I wonder if my internals look the same or possibly cleaner.