Over the past few months my car has been running rough, and I mean very rough.  It has a horrible hard starting problem followed by lots of exhaust smoke and then a helicopter-ish sound under acceleration.  I developed a pretty nasty miss that I figured had something to do with the spark plugs, though they had been replaced not that long ago (mileage-wise, not age-wise).  I decided to take a look in the spark plug wells and when I got a flashlight down in there I saw a nice black substance hanging out in the bottom.  I struck oil!  I used a spray nozzle to get most of the oil out of the front 3 wells and after it was all said and done I had close to 3 ounces or so of oil in a Mountain Dew can.  I thought maybe just the front well seals were leaking so I drove the car some more and it actually ran great until about a day later when the same symptoms arose again.  I decided to take her down to my shop and rip off the manifold to see if any of the rear plugs had oil hanging out with them.  Oh yeah, they did!  Even more than the front 3!  I got close to 6 ounces of oil out this time from the 6 plug wells.  To make a long story short I have since replaced the Valve Cover Gaskets and Plug Well Seals.  No more oil in the wells....*crosses fingers.*

Here's some pics of the fun!







Intake is off and watching me struggle with the valve covers from the safety of the workbench ( I stripped a VC bolt out so I had to pretty much hammer and chisel it out of the cover, it took about an hour to finally get it free.)

Here are the heads, with my (amazingly) good looking cams.  I didnt have a chance to check the shims nor replace them but I will get to that some other time.







I removed the back cover and replaced both gaskets along with all the plug well seals and now (as of last week) my car is bone dry in the wells and around the valve covers...now I just have to replace the leaky oil pan gasket.  Hooray!



Anyway, I will be checking into the price of oil pan end gaskets soon enough and Ive got enough RTV to seal a handful of oil pans so I will be set!  I want to get that shiny new Y-Pipe here so I can replace the stocker; I'm going to have to drop the exhaust anyway, why not replace it while I'm there.  I guess we will see how that all pans out.  I WILL be doing an engine swap on my baby here in the next few months.  For those of you unfamiliar with what a lot of MTX (Manual TransaXle - A.K.A. 5-Speed) guys are doing now-a-days....I will be pulling the motor out of an ATX (Auto) SHO, which is a 3.2 liter as opposed to the 3.0 liter that the stock MTX's came with, and mating that to my manual tranny and putting it in my car...with a few extra goodies :)  Should be a well worth it mod.