Colder Than a Witch's T*t

It snowed twice this week but nothing much in terms of accumulation. The second time it snowed, the temperature took a dip from 40 degrees down to about 10 at night. Saturday morning when we arrived at the boat, it was 20 degrees in the sun. No big deal. We can handle that easily. Well, that's what we thought.

The inside of the shed was really cold and even with our little electric heater going, the cabin of the boat was like a deep freeze. We set up the lights and put on our blue plastic gloves with our "fagans" (wool gloves with the ends of the fingers cut off) over them.  Even then, our torque wrench felt like ice. The picture above shows Bill beating on a bottle of dish washing liquid with a wrench. Hard as a rock.

But that's enough complaining.

Our concern was that the rocker arm shafts were torqued down properly. The small block Chrysler engine is unlike the GM small block in that there are no studs on which you mount each rocker arm. Instead, the rocker arms are slid onto a shaft. That shaft bolts down to the head. There are spacers that align the rocker arms properly along that shaft.

The specs calls for the shaft (with five bolts and spacers) be torqued down to 200 inch-lbs. That's 16.6 ft. lbs. and we torqued each side down to very close to that spec.

The next step will be to re-mount the intake manifold. While we were contemplating that, our friend Stu paid a visit. He's the guy who helped us get the heavy parts back up onto the boat two weeks ago. Stu is a GM guy but could see that I was going to have to place the intake manifold back down in exactly the right spot on the gaskets. No sliding around. He volunteered to give us a hand with that delicate move and we're going to take him up on his offer.

The intake manifold gaskets are interesting. Fel Pro's marine intake gasket set for this engine has end gaskets that have a peel-off sticky back. The directions have about 500 words of caution about mounting them, particularly where they overlap the side gaskets. We asked about that on the Chrysler Engine Forum where it was suggested that we also put a very thin film of gasket sealant over both the front and rear gaskets. Apparently, others have had problems sealing the end gaskets so we'll take their advice.

Then there are the side gaskets.

Nice quality, but they show their heritage from Chrysler truck engines. Those metallic pieces in the center of each gasket have to be installed in each gasket, which we did. They are for an exhaust gas crossover that is meant to heat the bottom of the carb and improve combustion, particularly during cold starts. They are completely useless for marine applications. In fact, Fel Pro makes marine intake gasket sets for GM small block engines that block off those passages. Unfortunately, nothing like that for Chrysler small block engines That we've been able to find, so we'll have to use these.