Just to give you an idea of what the scope of the project is...

Under Plenum hose kit (ordered from Joe) - replace all relevant hoses
By Pass hose kit (ordered from Joe) - replace all relevant hoses
Remove injectors and have them serviced at Deatsch
Rremove and replace O2 sensors
Remove and replace Knock sensors and knock sensor harness
Remove and replace Spark plugs
replace TB gasket
Replace IAC gasket
Replace EGR gasket
Replace plenum gaskets
Finally, just some general cleaning of parts...particularly the Plenum and TB.

Please use NICO to Communicate Effectively

Mine looks a little cleaner, but there are so many details.

Brian

Discover the power of the button!

That may be the only way my car finishes this adventure in an operational state.

might also want to do your heater hoses since you are going in this far....

wes will know, but do all your fuel hoses while in there, and don't forget to position the hose clamps so you can still get at them after plenum is back on. in 2 months, you'll be snugging them up again.....

We will have to replace fuel hose anyway since we are taking the rail out for the injector service...

i/we are going to make a raid at the autoparts store for some extra clamps (i always get pissed off at a few and break them, plus aftermarket clamps are better and easier to deal with IMO)

Im not sure if the heater hoses are going to be done this time around... When I did my plenum i inspected them and they looked fine, so i decided to save some money (those were EXPENSIVE)

I gave up and went inside for hot chocolate.

I'll try again tomorrow. Must...buy...heater!

This project is what I dream about doing to my car. Thanks for starting the thread it will help me a lot.

Quote, originally posted by ceningolmo »

I'm just hoping to survive this. Luckily Wes agreed to help me this coming Sunday. So, he will be here for reassembly. That may be the only way my car finishes this adventure in an operational state.

Come on have faith. Take on the Q.. 1 on 1 . I'm just kidding. I wouldn't . I'd definitely feel much more comfortable having Wes there too. You're lucky...count your blessings.

Quote, originally posted by ceningolmo »

Currently 16 degrees in my garage. I tried to work on stuff for about 5 minutes... froze my *** off... hands went numb and I dropped a socket somewhere in the valley of the engine. I gave up and went inside for hot chocolate. I'll try again tomorrow. Must...buy...heater!

. I know the feeling. It's -11° here.

Good Luck with the project and I can't wait to hear about the results, especially the driveability difference.

Try to beat these prices:

http://stores.shop.ebay.com/em...mrsZ1

Here are some pics of the KS, O2, spark plugs, Under Plenum hose kits, and By Pass hose kits after they arrived.

Also, since I will be performing this project in arctic-like conditions, I decided a garage heater would be a good idea. Here are some pics of what I bought.

And... here is the heater/Propane tank now that I finally got it set up. Working in a nice warm garage is the only way to go!

Quote, originally posted by elwesso »

just so everyone knows, im ammenable to being a traveling "tech"... fly me or pay for my gas and ill do whatever you need done on your Q

I think you're confusing "tech" and "call girl".

I pulled all the hoses, pulled the plenum, pulled the injectors, pulled the intake runners, and pulled KS.

Injector harness and KS harness sucked... they were old, brittle, and did not appear reliable. So, ordered new ones of each. **** those were expensive! $95 for the KS harness, $50 for the injector harness even though it has about 10x the amount of wire and connections. Anyway... those should be here tomorrow.

Accumulators showed up for both Q's today... Thanks Keith!! I'll get the dead ones back to you ASAP.

Pulled 7 of the spark plugs today, will finish the last one tomorrow. I'll get the ornament covers on tomorrow as well.

Here are some pics of some of the work with plugs...

The spark plugs I pulled don't appear to be more than a year old... I didn't know they had been replaced so recently or I wouldn't have bothered. But, since I was in there, I decided to replace them anyway. On the plus side... I'll sell the used ones I took out to someone for cheap. They look barely used.

My plan from here is the finish spark plugs, button up the ornament covers, and be done with anything related to the plugs. From there I will replace the KS harness and put in the new KS. After that, I will start reinstalling hoses... until I get to the injectors. I'll install new injector harness and reinstall freshly Deatsched injectors (3 of mine were completely dead and 2 more were nearly dead!). Once injectors, harness, and runners are all installed I'll move on to the plenum.

Hopefully i can get all that finished in a reasonable amount of time. When I get the engine compartment finished, i'm going to install the last 5 recharged accums, new brake pads, and do the O2 sensors. Then I'm done with the Silver one.

After that, it's time to repeat the whole process on the green Q. But, I'm going to add a little something new...I'm going to reseal the valve covers! Yikes... that should be interesting.

Time to start replacing hoses!

Be sure to tie that garage heater down... looks like it could propel itself right out of there! Might not be bad to have a CO2 detector in the garage too

Looks like you're having fun... keep up the pictures!

Heath

Sounds like Wes will be present for reinstallation of injectors... so, I'm sure he will keep me from doing anything that cause death to my engine.

As for the heater... it is an 80K BTU unit...and it sounds like freaking jet plane is taking off when I start it up. I'm not complaining... it's nice to work in a warm garage, but man that thing SERIOUS. I'm afraid to aim in the wrong direction for fear that it may begin peeling paint of the car or melting the walls of my garage.

CO2 detector? Would this help me with the fits of dizziness, black outs, and the feeling that I'm thinking REALLY slow? What if these symptoms don't necessarily present themselves just when the heater is on... what if, hypothetically, these symptoms have been routinely presenting themselves ever since the purchase of my first Q45?

Good stuff

Funny side note... a friend of mine said that firefighters and city police woke him up at 3:00a on Wednesday. Long story short, the readings in his upstairs neighbor's apartment were high - and his were higher... apparently a boiler in the basement had a problem. After huddling in a blanket on the couch for a few hours with all of the doors and windows open to a lovely Hoboken, NJ night - he went to work on 3 hours of sleep. I'm beginning to think that every house with any type of fossil fuel fired appliance should have a CO detector.

Heath

Unfortunately, in the end, we weren't able to get the car to idle properly. It started ok... will run smoothly for a moment, and then the idle drops significantly and will eventually stall. It is clear by the whistling sound that there is a vacuum leak somewhere in the system.

Sadly, I'm just too flippin tired to worry about fixing it right now. Wes took off (thanks again Wes!) with my car not running at the moment. Fortunately, he didn't seem to think it would be too tough to fix.

Seems like the #1 cylinder was the source of the air leak. So, sometime in the next couple of days I am going to remove the plenum and some hoses and see if I can reseat the gaskets and double check that all the hoses are sealed up properly and that all looks well and good. Hopefully that will fix up the air leak. If not, I'm sure I'll be back on here asking *** loads of questions.

More pictures to come... when I'm less tired and dejected.

Wes thought it was a good idea to go back and double check all the seals and connections. Air is coming in from somewhere. I shall find it!

Where exactly did you put that thumb?

One trick for finding vacuum leaks is spraying something cobustable under the hood (like brake parts cleaner or carb cleaner) at different areas. When the idle changes you know it's being sucked in and burning. I think it will make your second plenum job easier if you know where you're going to fix the leak.

The good news is that your second time around will be much easier...
Good Luck!

Heath

I have removed plenum, fuel rail, and runners again and here are a few of the highlights.

There were a couple of hoses that were not replaced that were iffy. One or two had some splits in them...so, I'm going to replace those.

I missed A LOT of clamps. I mean... A LOT. Its ridiculous... I knew there were one or two that I couldn't get to when I was putting things back together... but, this is just out of hand. I found probably 8 connections with no clamp on them.

I failed to install the new gasket on the IAC.

I failed to refill the coolant from the liquid that was lost when I pulled out the y shaped hose thing in the valley of the engine.

I failed to tighten the clamp on the main coolan hose running to the fill nozzle on the coolant system.

There were at least 3, possibly 4, small vacuum hoses that got disconnected or were never connected in the first place.

I found a pretty good sized chunk of plastic (about the size of a small fingernail) stuck between the intake gasket and the intake below the #1 runner. I'm sure this is where my issues with bolt alignment on #1 came from....and, probably didn't help with the air leaks.

So...I'm going to finish removing the rest of the runners and check those for any debris I missed the first time through. I'll remove the gaskets and give them a light cleaning (I never removed them the first time... I planned to but never did).

How do you guys feel about using a little RTV around the edges of the runners to make sure I get a good seal? Certainly this would be a very small amount...and, of course, it would be around the outside edge in order to make sure no RTV bleeds toward the intake holes. Since I am putting in the effort to clean all this stuff...I would like to be positive that I got a good seal on it this time.

After that I will go back through everything with a fine tooth comb... make sure it is all perfect. No missed clamps, no missed gaskets, no missed vacuum hoses. Christ, I feel like an idiot for missing that much ****.

Hopefully, I'll have learned all the hard lessons before I get started on the Green Q. I'm doing valve covers on that one...so, it would be nice if the stuff with hoses and runners went a little smoother next time.

First... one must actually connect the injector harness if one expects the engine to start.

Second...one must actually connect the TPS. Or... your Q will not shift out of 2nd gear...and, it will not idle properly.

Third... when connecting the throttle cable, do not tighten it all the way the first time. Leave some slack (yes, just like it says to do in the FSM ) in the cable. When I first started the car it idled fine... but, after hitting the gas pedal it didn't come back all the way. It kept idling at about 2500 until I readjusted cable.

Do not... I repeat... DO NOT... spill coolant all over the front of your effin engine when you decide to bring the coolant level up at the end. Why you ask? Well, the obvious reasons having to do with cleanliness. But, also because it will make your engine smoke like it is on fire when it has run for a moment or two....thus, you will think your car is dieing and you will have a heart attack. I would save you that moment of anxiety.

Finally... pat yourself on the back or have some ice cream or something in celebration of finishing the job!

Thanks for the encouragement everyone. Car #1 is done. Now to start on car #2... this time including valve covers. Wooo hoo.

Also found compact 3/8" 'butterfly' air ratchet with assortment of extensions, flex drives, u-joint,etc a tremendous time saver. Important to properly orient all the clamps so theycam be reached for tightening--and gotta do them in the right order or "Oh-S--t' I can't get to the stupid clamp to tighten it.. Nowhere else have I ever seen such a quagmire of small bore steel vacuum piping with that many hose ends. Any rational designer doing ANY optimization would have combined most into a couple of manifolds with branch-off connectors. And the number of water lines (on a TCS version) would drive any good plumber crazy!

I should have your accums coming back to you sometime in the week or so.

1. I'm just about done with the under plenum job on the green Q and I will be adding some info here soon.

2. This is handy info and I haven't turned it in to an article yet. So, this might give some people who haven't already seen this thread a chance to see it.

You really do want to do the valve cover gaskets when the plenum is off. The little special retaining washers are not cheap, but necessary if they are like mine at just 60K miles. I have the part numbers for the vacuum and injector hoses i bulk from Joe, which is the only way to buy them cheap.

On the valve cover, plenum, and runners, one must observe the FSM tightening sequence with lubricated bolt and stud threads, new gaskets and washers, in the correct (often two stage) sequence, with a calibrated torque wrench. Thus good even seals are assured for a long life and stripping of aluminum thread receptacles is eliminated.

The wrist torque wrench will never do for even the most experienced technician.

The whole point of a DIY is to do it better than a flat rate mechanic can by taking the time to do the little things like cleaning everything to as new condition and very careful reassembly, not to butcher your car. There is no savings there for poor performance or soon repeated labor becuase of careless reassembly.

Modified by maxnix at 6:25 AM 3/31/2007

Really? The point of working on your car is NOT to "butcher" it or to mistakenly reassemble it incorrectly? Thanks for the tip.

I've been there ceningolmo, all you have to do to redeem yourself is to do a couple more plenum jobs so that each gets easier. First time I pulled the intake/exhaust manifold off an old Chevy 250 I-6 it took me over two hours, the last tim, 20 minutes.

i still have some fluctuating issues with the Q. Idles at 450-750 but once in accelaration no vibration, runs fine. MIL is on all the time.....
i was supposed to buy a software for my usb-consult but i think theres some compatability issues with 94-94 TCS. i am still awaiting for some good news on that thread.