I order those last parts for my engine rebuild, and found that it would take a couple of weeks to receive. As I drove home, as usual, the last few miles through stoplights, after a long stretch of running, the engine starts to miss on 2 cyls, as usual, and is sputterring, as usual, as I pull down my suburnban street.
I was pretty tired of it.

I replaced the headgasket without removing the manifolds, and reused the exhaust flange gasket. I runs a lot bettter. I had a headgasket I picked up previously.

Materials needed:
Headgasket, maybe waterpump seals.

Tools:
1/2 and 11/16 socket, torque wrench, various screwdrivers and shop tools.

Procedure as follows:
-Put an unscrewed lightbulb on the underhood tray.
-Put big catch basin under car.
-Disconnect battery.
-First, try to undo the inner side exhaust flange nut. If you can get this one off, you can get the other two. Undo the other 2 nuts. If you can't, bag it.
-Remove lower radiator hose and drain coolant (like I didn't. I removed the upper only), and remove upper radiator hose from thermo housing.
-Remove rear heater hose from head.
-Remove alternator bracket bolt.
-Remove air and gas hoses and electrical connections from manifold and head.
-Disconnect air intake, throttle linkage.
-Remove, gently, valve cover, save gasket.
-Number and remove sparkplug wires from sparkplugs.
-Remove rocker assembly. (Having an automatic impact wrench saves a lot of unscrewing and screwing)
-Remove pushrods, (don't lift out lifters by accident,) and place in numbered punched-through piece of cardboard.
-Remove headbolts.
-Lift head and manifold assembly out of car and tip over onto some work surface.
(If you're me, immediately mop out the cylinders from antifreeze in case you can't get this finished today.)
-Scrape barnacles from head surface.
-Look at the old headgasket. You may see blowthrough between 2 and 3 or other funk.
-Push a 12" or longer mill file along the head surface until it approaches cleanliness. Watch for even brightening of the surface. Just to clean.
-Do the same to the block surface.
-Clean the headbolts. If you have an extra headbolt, grind a longways slot in one and 'chase' the thread in the block. Drop a little oil down the thread hole after.
-Check waterpump seals. I had recently replaced the pump so mine were fine.
-Put the gasket on the block. I stuck mine with a little avation gasket stickum.
-Place the head on the block.
-Make sure the exhaust flange gasket is in place, and very loosely bolt up the downpipe onto the exhaust flange. (If you don't do it now, you'll have to resort to some clever and somewhat scary leverage later.)
-Line up the gasket and insert the clean headbolts, tighten. Book sez 3 steps 28 ftlb and 58 ftlb right off, then run 10 minutes, then 68 ftlb.
-Replace pushrods
-Replace rocker assembly. Tip rockers to meet pushrods, then tighten down.

-Hook up hoses, electrical, linkage, tighten exhaust.
-Reconnect battery.

If you forget to align the exhaust flange bolts, you can lever over the engine on its mounts enough to allow it to slip into place, but it take either extra hand or dangerously propping the lever in place while you fit the pipes.

I did find a good trick for holding the gasket against the upper flange while mounting. It's called masking tape. Pull out before tightening the flange nuts.

-Drain and refill the oil.

-Run the car for a bit, then remove the valve cover and rocker assembly,
-Retorque the headbolts, then adjust the valves. Top up the coolant.

You were wondering about the lightbulb. It serves 2 purposes. First off, it's a handy spare. I use a trouble light, and they always blow bulbs. Second, it's fragile, and keeping it right on top in front of the workspace helps keep me from jumping around too much or moving too fast when I'm doing work like this and getting hurt or making a dumb mistake as you get closer to finishing the job and you're tired and hungry and annoyed at having to do this at all with no clear assurance it will fix anything. (Like forgetting to align the exhaust flange bolts). I wanted to make as short as possible work of this job.

Seems fine. Started 7:30pm, finished 10:30pm. Snowing lightly. Went to bodega and got a donut after.

It started and ran to work better this morning.

I still want to do that new engine, but now it's not such a rush.












--
MPergiel, Elmhurst, IL '74 145e T-5 'Orange Alert'