My coworker drives a nice new Camaro. When he leaves the office, I can hear his car make a nice throaty rumble. It’s a beautiful car.
I drive a 1994 Toyota Corolla. Unfortunately, when I leave the office, you can also hear my car make a throaty rumble. It’s a kind of junky car. (But, I like it.)
My car has for the past month has had a problem with the exhaust manifold. Your car needs air to run. The manifolds are how the air gets into and out of your engine. The intake manifold and the exhaust manifolds are pretty well named.
I’ve been working on trying to fix it. If there are leaks in your exhaust system they make a lot of noise. Imagine cutting off the muffler. Anyway, I eventually decided to do the shopvac test. You reverse the vacuumed so it becomes a unwieldy leaf blower. You then “pressurize” the system.
And finally, you squirt soapy water on all the parts of it and look for bubbles. Bubbles are bad.
I had lots of bubbles.
At least I know knew why I was getting so much noise.
If the air making the bubbles can escape so can the noise.
Replacing an exhaust manifold is not difficult. You remove the heat shield, remove the manifold bolts and the support bracket. And then you can remove the manifold.
Then replace two gaskets. The one between the manifold and the engine.
And one between the manifold and the exhaust pipe.
The hardest part actually was torquing the bolts to the right tension. The bolts on the manifold are 27 foot pounds. And the bolts to the exhaust pipe were 34 foot pounds. But my torque wrench was in inch pounds. Do you know how to convert foot pounds to inch pounds? You multiply by 12. So 27 foot pounds is 324 inch pounds. And 34 foot pounds is 408 foot pounds. I have to admit I used my phone.
Reinstall the heat shield.
Anyway, a few short hours and my car now sounds like a 1994 Toyota Corolla with 294,000 miles.