So my car has been burning up a quart of oil every 250 miles for the past few months and I decide it's time to try replacing valve stem seals as the first cheap option. Mistake #1 was I decided to do it as part of one big project that also involved replacing the water pump and balance shaft seals, of which I had only a day and a half before I needed the car to go to work.
To make a long story short, I managed to get through all the tough parts, including getting all the cam tower bolts off without breaking/stipping any of them, getting the valve springs off with the head still on (for cyl 1, anyway), and pulling off the old seals (which were pretty dried up and hard). Thinking it would be pretty straightforward, I find a appropriately sized deep socket to drive the new seal onto the valve guide since they fit pretty tightly, decided to tap it on with a hammer, expecting to be able to tell when it was fully installed, and ended up pushing it way too far onto the guide.
...these things definitely don't come back off in usable condition, and I only bought 8 of them! (mistake #2) I haven't been so devastated/pissed off in all my life!
So then it just turned into an experiment seeing if I could figure out a positive way to tell how far they should be installed, but that ended up mostly "lets just destroy the rest of them, throw it all back together and pretend this never happened!"
So it's been running with no valve stem seals on cyl 1 for the past 2 weeks, and I've swallowed the failure enough to order new parts and will try it again next week (burned 5 qts of oil going to Kentucky and back...that's $6 x 5...plus gas!)
So, the big question is, how are these stupid things properly installed? How much leway do they have in terms of position on the valve guide between getting pushed on as far as possible without deforming the seals and not far enough so they risk coming off/hitting the valve spring retainer? Is there any specification? The factory manual is pretty vague. I thought this part was going to be easy (mistake #3)...
The other thing I noticed was the exahst valve felt kind of loose in the guide. I wouldn't be surprised if the valve guide was shot, as the intake felt nice and tight. Do the exhaust valves have more play due to more thermal expansion, or is it done.
Another question is how air tight are normal cylinders supposed to be? I resorted to rigging up a compression tester fitting to an air compressor to hold the valves (I couldn't get the rope trick to work to save my life), and the thing would only build up about 40 psi. I was using a portable air compressor designed stuff like filling tires, but it's rated at 1 cfm at 30 psi and can normally build up 80 psi no problem. I could definitely hear air leaking quite a bit inside the engine, but couldn't tell exactly where it was going. I'm thinking the exaust valve seats are in bad shape, since they felt pretty rough when pulling the valve against the seat and rotating it, and the guide also felt worn, possibly causing the seat to wear out funny. It could be piston rings/cyl wall since it seemed like it might have been coming through the crankcase breather hose.
Thanks in advance!
