Take a hammer and apiece of wood wrapped in a ragor use a rubber mallet and rap your valve cover to get them loose.

Don't wallop the hell out of it , you don't want to dent them if they are steel. Just enough of a love tap to break the seal.


Or use a screwdriver under the lip but I broke an aluminum valve covers doing that once. Once.

 

I ran across town at least 3 times today looking for different parts. I'm going with the high-temp cork gaskets I already have, since no other place in town has a good rubber with steel core gasket. I'm also just going to use the standard bolts for these since nowhere had the fancy studs (gotta love living in the middle of nowhere).

The valve covers came as a kit, so they've got the grommets and PVC stuff I need. I'm not anticipating any problems, but we'll see.

 

sounds like you know what your doing. but i wouldve gotten the rubber ones....

 

Were the original gaskets used rubber or cork? The specific gaskets I have are Fel-Pro cork-rubber ones, they came with a 1-year warrantee which none of the other available gaskets had so I'm assuming they're at least somewhat of better quality.

 

You don't need to, but it's not a bad idea to use a little on the vc side of cork gaskets just to keep them from sliding around. I prefer the rubber ones for reusability, though.

 

Ok, got the job done. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but it would have been much easier had I the space and equipment to pull all the hoses and replace them with ones of better length for clearance and looks. They aren't perfect, but after 40 years, everything else under the hood isn't either. I'm happy with the looks, and the touch of body color for the lettering sets them off nicely.

 

Glad to see it worked out. Looks nice.


He probably used gasket sealer, and this is why you shouldn't.

If the gaskets move around, an old trick is to tie them to the valve covers using sewing thread passed through the mounting holes in both the cover and the gasket. You don't have to tie every hole. The thread does not interfere with the bolts or affect the seal.

 

I've never had any problem using sealer on one side of a cork gasket, the valve cover side. If you use it on both sides, then yes, it sticks everything together and forces you to scrape RTV off of the top of the cylinder head.

It's not a big deal on aluminum vc's, but stamped steel vc's are almost always warped and a little bit of RTV helps seal them up.