Chronicles of Barron

Fun last couple of days, noticed a stronger gas smell in the garage, checked the bikes. Nope, look under the Ferrari and yes, there's a visible drip right where the xpipe is. Decided to deal with it another day and pushed it outside. Jacked it up and see it's coming from clamp vicinity on the tube. The car is almost out of fuel so let's drain, so yeah my 3 gallon bucket was about 2 gallons to small, fuel everywhere in the gravel, I'm a man so I forge ahead, got it drained, unclamped and yanked the tube out, turns out the holding clamp wasn't the trouble, it was the years of it rubbing on the water pipe 90. There's very little room here
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Here's the action area, see the support bracket, that's initially where I thought the bad people were
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Look at the horror, I could order a new one, wait a week and be out of $300 or fix my priceless original
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Prepped it for welding, made a patch for ease of welding, decided to wire feed rather than tig and blow holes thru contaminated aluminum
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Buzz buzz, check for pin holes (yes) grind, buzz, recheck and we're golden. Reassembled with the addition of some fuel hose to help alleviate any rubbing that could happen in the future. This is definitely an area that all of you should check if your cars up in the air
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

And done, for those of you following along, there's no horsepower increase with this fix just amazing gas mileage, on par with one of those soulless electric nothings some people identify with
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

I’m back into it, time to change the oil and look under the plenum, other small things, right off the bat I can see intake gaskets have walked out on two runners, that’s a weird one
Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Ok so intake was easy to remove, of course every hose under it is rotting and sweating oil and water, figures, it’s a dirty pig mess. Now what I don’t get is the old damage to the intake mating surfaces on the heads, it’s like it was beat with a hammer and the hit with screwdrivers on end, there’s pronounced aluminum raised up and beat down on edges. I can’t fathom what why where who would do this let alone reassemble without smoothing this stuff
Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Another sucky part is I can see some leaky valve guides, three or four valves are pretty oiled and grimy, I’m not ready to yank heads and fix those, maybe in a couple years, doesn’t smoke. For a 60k mile car it looks like it was Magnums stunt driver. Ordered all new gaskets, I’ll get it squared away so it’s pretty next time I go in deep

 

Who did it
Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Oh and because I’m into self flagellation I got myself a Fiat/Dino/Ferrari van, no idea why and I don’t need it
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

One more thing to complain about, 7 injectors are steel and one is brass, their beat too. Luckily Uncle Ettore’s ol’ Fashioned injector service came thru over a year ago with the super kit (30 horse at least) also code name: SeattleM5

 

You can’t just rush in and switch out injectors, you need to think about life n stuff, oh look! A butterfly!

 

You all think I’m dead but I’m not, I lurk, I judge
Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Mmmmm
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

It sure is, I’m sure it worked great as a topical solution

 

Getting deeper, inspect, investigation, figured out what the weird marks on the heads are from, it’s clear now that someone used a pry bar to try and remove plenum and intake runners as a unit not realizing it’s on an angled plane, more silicone found sealing water pipe mating surfaces, decide to dye and file it, way way off, rechecked runners too, not even close to flat, no wonder gaskets walked away. It’s fun finding this stuff, the horsepower increases may bring me into 1997
Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login