Well I thought some of you might be interested in how the thermostat change came out. Well I stasrted on Friday night to remove the heat shield first after the air cleaner. I got three bolts out and could not access the forth one. Even after dropping a socket and estension into the black hole. My son came over Saturday and after rotating the engine forward we got that bolt out. Then We removed the water bypass pipe and was still unable to remove the heat shield from the car. Still fearful of breaking exhaust studs and time getting short we called it quits and decided to take it to a shop. He said to bring it in Monday and give him a couple of hours. Well on Monday he discovers it is the intake manifold gasket leaking. According to him a common thing on this engine and supposedly there is a class action lawsuit in the works about it. Anyway on Wednesday we picked up the car and he is talking about how there isn't much room to work on it. I don't know how much time he spent, but he just charged the book of seven hours as near as I could tell. Well Saturday we found there was a new leak on a hose from the collant bypass pipe into the fuel injector body. Cured that, at least for now by loosening the clamp and pushing the hose further up on the connector and putting the clamp back on. Seems to be all dry now. Back in the old days when I had two or three cars as spare vehicles I would have spent probably seventy hours and done all this myself. Hopefully I would have saw the leak was at the manifold while going for the thermostat. By the way the stat was bad. It didn't get off cold before and it is now in the normal range. Nice to have a better heater also. Just to show sometimes you have to do what a man has to do. Ron
