When you have the lower intake off it's the chance to clean parts. Most critical is the hydraulic lifters. You can test them in place by compressing them with the rods. If they are hard or softness is very uneven among different ones, I would clean the lifters properly. I don't know if just soaking them will do that.

 

Thanks I’ll try to clean what I can. Do you have to disassemble all the lifters and soak them in a solvent? Do you remove the rocker arms and clean out any heavy sludge or carbon deposits that way? I’ll have to figure this out, but I’ve seen the AB head gasket videos showing them being removed, which didn’t look too bad.

 

I removed the rocker arm assembly but didn't take it apart and cleaned it. I cleaned the push rods and the lifters only. Disassembling the lifters is required to clean them properly. Make sure that you don't lose any of the small parts and do not mix the parts. Disassembly is easy as soon as you have the piston out (they can be stuck).

 

If you're going to remove the lifters to clean them, be careful to keep track of the bore from which you remove them and replace them in the same locations. Same with the push rods.

When I replaced the headgaskets in my truck I took a short length of 2x4 and drilled two rows of eight holes to create a rack for the pushrods, with an arrow marked with a Sharpie to indicate the front of the engine from which they were removed. We did that in my high school auto shop class nearly 50 years ago. You could do the same to store and keep track of the bores for the lifters.

As for the rocker arm assemblies, you'll have to remove them to remove the pushrods and lifters. Again, keep track of the side of engine from which they came.

p.s. What does this topic have to do with coil pack replacement?

 

For the push rods take a piece of cardboard, punch holes in it, mark the holes for cylinder exhaust/intake and store them there. For the lifters I used 8 cans, each one marked with cylinder exhaust/intake in order to store the parts separately and not mixing them up. I did one one side at a time. As I already posted an ultrasonic cleaner with a cheap degreaser cleaned the parts perfectly. Look up my posts, I linked a YT video with instructions how to clean the lifters.

 

About the thread title, I didn’t really plan to get down to the valve covers and valley pan, but I had so much fun getting the coil packs out of there it’s just all happening - relocating coils after all that too. Never want to do that again. The upper intake with SAI is more of a bitch than the AB video or anyone else let on, so I decided I’m doing more than just coil packs after all.

I found the ultrasonic cleaner video. Did just getting that amount of stuff out of them make them all operate properly again? I saw a video on disassembling and reconditioning GM lifters - maybe ours are pretty similar to that, not too much I can screw up if I’m careful? I’ll keep everything organized and clean everything carefully.

 

Instead of taking off top of motor, just get a coil relocation kit. Very easy to disconnect the coil wires and relocate to the front of motor next to the alternator