Where were you CJ???
shamrock
Active Jeeper
Waited all morning for CJ to show up....I was positive he wouldn't be able to resist a 7 hour drive just to help me replace the valve cover gasket on my gay yellow German car. For those who haven't had the luxury of working on German engineering, let me tell you...it's a good way to help gain an appreciation for American made motors. I grew up with knowing that most valve covers used a handful of bolts to secure, a half a can of beer and about 10 minutes of your time to remove and then replace. BMW has seen fit to make this happy go lucky 10 minute job turn into 3 hours of scratching your head and wondering why they need 15 bolts to secure a valve cover along with another dozen or so bolts to hold the coil packs, a few more bolts for various grounding wires, several very strange wire harness clips that threaten to shatter as force is applied and of course, the one bolt in the very back that takes a twistomatic wrist and two long fingers to reach (I counted 5 cramps received as this bolt was taken out). Once valve cover is off, it's soon discovered that it's really not the cover gasket that leaks...it's the round little gaskets that go around each spark plug hole...they leak and they seem quite happy to do so. Leaking spark plug hole gaskets also tend to cause heaps of dripping oil that eventually makes it's way to the exhaust headers where lots and lots of funny smelling smoke is produced. Anyway...leaks have been stopped if only for the moment. If anyone here finds themselves turning 50 and decides to regain some lost youth by buying a 10 year old sports car, I am now well versed in gasket replacement, seat cable repairs, diff changes, soft top pondering, brake switch cussing, climate control computer destruction (ask CJ about that one...and don't ask me about soldering), getting my doors blown off by super charged Mustangs and explaining to people that yellow is not a gay color.
