Yeah, I guess that's true with the oem bolts, you had to back them off because of the degreeing. It may have been better to just leave them untouched then. I'm guessing that when you loosened them though, the sealing surface of that hg may have been compromised.

As for the Hondata gasket. That pos tends to distort under heat and the bolts won't stay tight because of it. Also, when this happens, coolant can leak from the coolant port to the cylinders. There is a coolant port that runs from the head to the intake manifold that is blocked off by this gasket.

 

Do you live in Texas and did you drive into a lake?

 

You are describing my EXACT problem i had on another car when using a copper gasket. I tried everything and couldn't get it to seal. The give away was that I could never bleed my coolant system. I would bet you have TONS of air in the set-up and will never get rid of it.

I just never had good luck with the copper gaskets. Went back to a layer'd composite gasket and no more problem.

Finding the problem is half the battle. GI-joe

J. R.

 

what line from the water pump to the manifold??

 

I get condensation out of my exhaust after start up that looks just like your car in the video. It goes away after the car has passed its initial start up. Didn't think this was something to be concerned with

 

I still think its just condensation.

 

i would first work out if your cooling system is fully bled. If you have very hot heat coming through the vents, while idling, after the car is warmed up, you know that the system is fully bled. If coolant is getting into the cylinders at idle, then a leak down will tell you whats happening very quickly. If not, drive the car and see if the coolant system degradates.

In regards to your heat cycling the stock bolts and re torquing them, i've never heard of someone doing that to torque to yield style bolts.

 

I am going to try a the leak down test tonight that should tell me quite a bit. I do have a good amount of heat when I turn on the vents so I am pretty sure I have all the air out. I may try and open the bleeder again tonigh and see it there is any bubbles.

As for the retorque, there are lots of people that reuse the stock bolts, how do they retorque?

 

When you did your first tq and degreeing, did you degree it with a tq wrench to see what the final tq ended up being? That would have been the best thing to do and instead of loosening the bolts after the heat cycle, you would have just checked to see if that tq was still good with all the bolts. You could have done this with a dial indicated tq wrench or a clicker type. Dial would have been easier though. With a clicker tq wrench, when you did your final degreeing, you just put a the torque wrench on each bolt and adjust it until the bolts just barely move and it clicks. You would then record each bolts final tq and this would have told you what tq to check them at after the heat cycle.

 

I probably should have used a dial type wench and recorded the final torque value during the initial setting. Then set my click style up for that and retorqued to the averaged value.