This Is A New Problem To Me

[Dale]

So, my 84' 318 engine in my 71' W100 seemed to start and run fairly well with the dual plane Offenhauser 360 aluminum intake manifold. Looking at this poor engine, I get the feeling there were too many spoons in the stew at one time. For starters, there was oil leaks from the front and back of the manifold. No water passages were leaking. A big next problem noticed was the lock washers used in conjunction with the manifold mounting bolts, can you believe that? Plus, one bolt snapped off on me removing this hod-podge assortment of crap bolts and washers. When I removed the manifold bolts, they looked defeated, and bent.

I really cleaned up the manifold mating surfaces, purchased a steel gasket kit from Fel-Pro, new grade 8 1 1/2" bolts, and had some good thick 3/8" washers and got it all together. Time was made to trim down the o.d of the thick washers so they shall sit flat on the manifold, and had to make right again all the places where those lock washers had dug into the manifold and really done a number. I tightened the manifold down correctly going around about 12 times. I made the manifold look like it just came out of the box, chased all the thread holes, just about everything I could. Chased the head thread holes as well.

Now the problem I did not notice at tear down, was that this particular manifold don't have the same angle as the LA heads. There are bolt heads that do not sit flat on top of the washers. I'd like to add here, that to the best of my knowledge the manifold seems to mate squarely in angle with the cylinder heads. Some of the 12 bolts do sit while some are close. #9 and # 10 have the most amount of space between the bolt head and top of the washer. The bolt hole locations in the manifold are a littler larger than the 3/8" bolts that I find odd as well. Here I used a little Permatex on the bolts before install.

Seems to have tightened down tightly. Don't know what to think at this point. Certainly I must have made things much better though. Puzzling to me was that the install instructions for the gaskets never mentioned what side goes up or down. I installed the flat side against the plane of the head, with the exhaust block off on the right side, and the open on the left. The "bevel" side of the gasket went to the manifold side. I looked for information on what side of the steel gasket went where, but nothing clear could be determined.

So tomorrow, I get to set the new distributor into place! Im not throwing money into this engine at this point. It ran well to begin with. Just having some curiosities about it all. Cant wait to get it started!

Thanks,
John