Not to incur the slings and arrows of angry listers but, go ahead and have the professional mechanic retorque the heads. By it's very definition, Retorgueing means (in this isolated case) draining the coolant, backing off the head nut (one at a time in proper order) and bringing them back up to proper torque. If a stud is going to break, most likely it will break anyway. Just don't have at it and try bringing up the torque from its corroded in place state. Okay I'll admit it, after replacing two heads and suffering the classic "huffing coolant from the recovery tank" symptoms after about 600 miles, I retorqued my heads to 40 (!) foot-pounds, (hey, I'll have to take the SOBs off again anyway so why not? calibrated T/W BTW), and no more problems of that sort. If the coolant system is being pressurized by combustion gas, it will either work, or it won't. If it's leaking on the pavement, this won't help. HTH Dave |
Please note - During the past 17 years of operation, several gigabytes of
Vanagon mail messages have been archived. Searching the entire collection
will take up to five minutes to complete. Please be patient!
Return to the archives @ gerry.vanagon.com
The vanagon mailing list archives are copyright (c) 1994-2011, and may not be reproduced without the express written permission of the list administrators. Posting messages to this mailing list grants a license to the mailing list administrators to reproduce the message in a compilation, either printed or electronic. All compilations will be not-for-profit, with any excess proceeds going to the Vanagon mailing list.
Any profits from list compilations go exclusively towards the management and operation of the Vanagon mailing list and vanagon mailing list web site.