Inlet Valley gasket replacement

I seemed to have a top-end oil leak which appears to be coming from the valley gasket. Also, the rocker covers were in a very bad shape and just generally dirty and tired.

Quite Straightforward to strip it down. Start by removing the viscous fan. I didn’t have a spanner to fit the enourmous nut, so I used a chain wrench with a another large screwdriver jammed in the pump bolts to hold it.  The nut is a NORMAL thread, NOT LEFT HANDED.

With the fan removed, use a ratchet to release the tension on the belt and remove it.

Slowly carry on disconnecting all the pipes and wires. De pressurise the fuel rail and release the feed and return lines.

The vacuum pipe to my regulator was perished and will be replaced. As you can see, everything is very corroded on the outside and oily on the inside.

Remove all the manifold bolts and finally remove the manifold.

I used a vacuum to clean up the valley area before removing the gasket to prevent muck getting in the engine. You can see that the rocker covers are in a real state. It took me ages to clean these up.

With the gasket off, I had a general look around. The block was a dark brown, but certainly not “black death”. I rotated the engine around twice and checked that all the camshaft lobes were present(!) - which they were. So given the reasonable compression pressures, I decided not to tear the engine down any further.

Ported inlet manifold and 71mm plenum

Given my fathers trade of cylinder head gas flowing, I thought I may as well clean up the inlet manifold whilst it was off the car.

Not expecting great gains, but the inlets were pretty small compared to the gasket and the trumpet inlet had quite a step going into the manifold. So I spent a couple of hours with windys.

I also was doing a 71mm plenum for someone else with a P38, so I also did mine at the same time.  Now unless you have lots of other supporting mods, this wont make a huge difference - but I does give the engine a better pickup from idle - Only really because you are allowing more air in for a give throttle position. Both myself and the other P38 driver felt that it gives an improvement the the rather flat feeling of the GEMS p38.

I spent considerable time cleaning and refurbishing all the parts as they went back on - but the results were well worth it.