O RLY?!

I purchased a re-manufactured cylinder head for $180 plus core.  I bought a new head gasket, new intake manifold gaskets, and new valve cover gasket from the dealer. I couldn’t get the intake studs out of the old head, so I bought some new studs too. Then I mangled the cam shaft seal while removing it, so I ordered a new one of those too.

The new head is on and torqued down per the Haynes manual (5 step process). I left the exhaust manifold in the car and then slid it on over the studs after attaching the new head. I couldn’t figure out how to get the manifold+turbo out of the engine compartment even with the head removed from the block. The head+manifold+turbo probably would’ve been too heavy for me to install solo anyway.

Waiting on some studs and the cam seal right now.

I broke an exhaust stud when I was removing the exhaust manifold.  I read up on how to extract the stud and decided I would try it.  I spent a couple days reading about it and talking to people to get myself all psyched up. . . and I failed.   I could not get the remains extracted with an extractor, so the next step was to drill the same size hole and re-tap the threads. The cylinder head is made of aluminum, so it’s relatively soft, and I either drilled to far, or I was slightly off center, because a cooling passage was compromised.  After running the engine for a few minutes, I started losing coolant out of the valve cover.  Not good.

Only fix is to replace the head.  Remanufactured cylinder heads for this engine are fairly common (it was used in the Maximas through the 90s), so it was easy to find a supplier.