Valve guide seal replacement

I did valve stem seals on mine a couple of years ago in my driveway with the motor in the car. It's doable but it is tedious and frustrating (mostly the putting the valve spring retainer locks back in).

There's not much room to work in a few spots with A/C lines, master cylinders and strut towers getting in the way and it's tight in the heads with the cams and cam towers making access difficult, but, like I said, it can be done if you're patient. I think I wrote up a postmortem thread back when I did it.

Some people say you have to change the valve guides out also or you'll continue to have problems but it's been almost exactly 2 years and I've put on 12K miles since with no more smoking (the car has 137K total). Your, uh, mileage may vary.

I ended up not using anything but new seals. I was going to put new valve cover gaskets on but I was sent the wrong ones and I ended up returning them and putting the old ones back on instead of waiting for the correct ones. New seals, the Trick Flow spring compressor tool, a tube of RTV to help with the gaskets and a compression tester kit from Autozone to use with an air compressor to hold the valves open was about all I needed. I did lose a retainer lock and had to make a trip to the Ford dealership for a few extras.

It was probably one solid days work from start to finish but I think I spread it out over a couple of days with a sick day in between. If I'd had a proper tool for inserting the retainer locks, it would've gone a good bit faster and if I'd been feeling better I probably wouldn't have struggled as much but once I had it apart, I had to get it put back together.

It's one of those jobs that doesn't sound too bad on paper - remove valve covers, remove rockers, remove springs, pop out seals and then you just do the reverse. Multiply everything by 16 valves and all of a sudden it takes a lot longer than you anticipated

Never done it before, but have heard from a close friend that it can be done by yourself in a weekend. Less with beer (which brings friends).

Something to throw around. If you are going that deep into the heads....throw those cams in you wanted to get a while back. Now's the time to possibly upgrade the springs and stuff too if you have the money.

Nightfire said:

I have a big problem when it comes to cams, there is nobody within 600 miles of me that does dyno-tuning. I've called the very few performance shops here and they said that I would haveto fly someone in to do the tune and that is waaaay out of my price range. The few people that have done cam swaps here have taken their cars 600+ miles away to have the tune done. I can't do that.

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Pro Racer Package FTMFW.

I am aware that a compression test and further a leakdown test can identify if the valve seals are bad. Are any of you guys experiencing, during idle, small puff misfires? My car idles fine but every second or 2 I hear small misfire puffs. But no noticeable misfire when the engine has load.

I am thinking it's leaking oil from the seals into the combustion chamber and causing small misfires.

Keep in mind that replacing the cams is a more involved procedure too. If you have bolt-on cam gears it's not as bad but if you have press fit gears then there's a whole lot more disassembly to be done to remove the cams - front cover and everything that entails, timing chains and related hardware. The cams need to be in place for the spring compressor tool to work - they're what it hooks on to and gets leverage from.

Nightfire said:

I have a big problem when it comes to cams, there is nobody within 600 miles of me that does dyno-tuning. I've called the very few performance shops here and they said that I would haveto fly someone in to do the tune and that is waaaay out of my price range. The few people that have done cam swaps here have taken their cars 600+ miles away to have the tune done. I can't do that.

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That sucks. I've driven 6 hrs one way to get a car tuned before. Makes for a fun trip back though. We were racing every car we saw.