My Montana is under open heart surgery. The lower intake manifold gasket was leaking, externally.
I went to my dealership to see it open this morning and the mechanic showed me the culprit...the new gasket that he is going to install is different.
For the one working in this business , can you tell me if the new design is better than the old one ??
The sealing quality of the gasket has been improved and torque must be changed to a revised specification. Threadlocker must also be applied on the intake bolts.
There is more than just a gasket problem. While changing mine I was able to remove 4 of the intake bolts by hand...
there are also larger steel dowels near the EGR tube...
Huh? What are you talking about?
Ian
I don't know either but I saw some steel dowel in the new gasket. The material seems different too. Can you share your opinion on the new and improved ?? gasket kit ?
I hope to be ok for awhile, 25000 miles is a bit early to open an engine, but I caught it on time , no internal damage.
Those steel pellets in the gasket are there so that you can put a higher torque on the bolts in those locations. Basically, to prevent the gasket from collapsing or breaking from too much torque. The new 3.5 engine, (which looks virtually identical to the older 3.1/3.4 engines) has an even newer design intake gasket that uses an additional bead of the gasket material around the coolant ports. It looks like they are attempting to provide a second line of defence against the coolant leaking internally.
Even the old style gaskets would seal for a year or two, so it's hard to say how well the new gaskets will work long term. Probably the biggest problem I see is the bolts have no torque on them when you have a leaker. Applying a good loctite to properly cleaned bolts is probably half the battle.
No, you should be fine. Even with a lot of coolant going into these engines, we don't see that many catastrophic failures. Probably will happen down the road a ways, if at all.
How about retorquing the bolts let say on a yearly basis ?
The upper doesn't seems to be hard to remove.
The new procedures requires loctite or not ?
They changed my cam sensor too, the wire were soak with oil and the insulation was damage. I spoke to the young mechanics and he seems to me to be concencious.
Nothing to complain about his job so far, car left clean, no fingers on the hood, let see on the long run now !!
"ega" wrote: > The sealing quality of the gasket has been improved and torque must be > > changed to a revised specification. Threadlocker must also be applied > on the > intake bolts. > > There is more than just a gasket problem. While changing mine I was > able to > remove 4 of the intake bolts by hand...
Since this problem has been going on so long why doesn?t GM require the engine manufacturer to initially use the new gaskets and tighten the bolts?Is it because they go more than 36K before they leak?
You got it! The older engines use the same style of gasket, but their gasket was not updated.....why? Because they are all way out of warranty and GM is not concerned about them anymore.
Ian
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