[glhs#116]

OK. So well over 24 hours setting time has passed. I missed my chance to go drive while the sun was up and I knew a drive in the dark wouldn't show me much. I was planning a drive in the morning but I just figured I'd fire it up in the garage and let it warm up. Well, that was very enlightening. As soon as it was all warmed up, here comes the smoke. Not a lot, but pretty noticeable in an enclosed space like the garage. Not hard to see the faint blue cloud in the air up by the lights. And of course you could smell it. Like after my previous night drive. But I didn't have to drive it. Just needed to get the whole engine warmed up.

So I thought, let's see what the new plugs say. To be honest, I never tried pulling new plugs that had only ever had a warmup at idle and a rev or two but no driving. Well, they all looked pretty damned clean. I guess that's what you get when you don't have much runtime or much heat in them. But they told me enough I think.

Whilst for the most part they all looked almost new there were some things I could see. #1 was starting to darken. This corresponds to the cylinder that gets darkest normally. I'm guessing that for whatever reason it just runs richer or something. But the telltales were #7 and #6. Now #7 was my really oily plug previously. And #6 was one of two I suspected on the passanger bank (along with #2). Well, they both still looked almost new but they also both came out with some wet oil on the strap. And while it wiped right off the other thing you could see was the shininess of the porcelain on #7 and #6 compared to the matte finish on the others. These were almost certainly my smokers.

So I thought to combine that with what else I knew. I knew that I'd surely sealed up those rocker studs this time. I knew that my oil is coming from the top because I saw it pooled behind a valve or two when the intake was off. I knew something was different since the porting. Well, I figure I'm down to one thing: the possibility of oil weeping in from the one headbolt bulge breakthrough I know about and perhaps another that I didn't notice (or that just went porous without breaking visibly). The other thing that arrived today was the ARP sealant. This is what ARP recommends when their bolts go into non-blind holes. Well, Pontiac headbolt holes are blind so the oil pull-in has to be from around the washer and bolt head at the top. I'm going to remove those headbolts one at a time and clean off the washer and head and replace the ARP lube with the ARP sealant there (I'll leave the standard ARP lube on the threads). There's only four of them that go past the runners and I'll do them one at a time.

That's the plan.

Sam