So wrapping up oil pan gasket, front cover job and I managed to have 1 bolt left over, it is driving me crazy. This whole job I've been quite organized except for when I pulled the oil pan as I got a little frustrated. It's a 13mm 6 point shoulder bolt about 2.5" long, all black and head has similar grime build up from bottom of car. This bolt stood out from the oil pan ones as it is longer than the 4 that go into the bell housing and all of the oil pan bolts are reinstalled and accounted for...I could have dropped it from when I pulled off accessories however I checked everything and nothing jumped out to me that's missing.

Kind of freaking out as already have heads back on and torqued, oil pan and front cover back on..

Any thoughts or insight?

 

Only place l can think of, would be the bolts that hold the alternator bracket. Believe there are either three or four and easy to miss installing one...although...if memory serves me...they are a tad longer than 2.5 inches.

Did you remove the oil pick up tube? Can't remember if that was a bolt or a stud with a spacer?

Not much help, l know. Work on to many different engines to remember this stuff fluently. Maybe a picture of the bolt will jog the old memory.

 

Front cover uses all shoulder bolts about that length. I have saved all mine from an engine tear down and only one of them was black.

 

Doesn’t quite seem to match. Oil pick up is 2 small bolts and definitely got that hooked back up with a new o-ring

have alternator bracket bolts and they are larger than this one.

 

front cover bolts have smaller heads than 13mm. I'm kind of stumped as all the oil pan hardware is 13mm head but this is an outlier and not close to any of those sizes

 

That looks like it could be oil pan to transmission bell housing.

 

I have all 6 bolts in and none were this length, 4 facing the front and the 2 big ones with the bolt head facing the rear. It does look like it's associated with the oil pan but for the life of me can't make sense of it. It's not one of the 2 that are sunk way up in the back by the bell housing either.

 

Thanks for posting the picture. I just took a quick look through the bolts I saved from the engine tear down and I didn’t see that one. Did it get mixed in by accident from something else? That’s definitely not an oil pan bolt.

 

It's definitely possible I dropped it when tearing down all the accessories or even from another car project. It just really has the same gunk of oil/coolant that the rest of the hardware does from this job lol. I guess i'll start putting it all back together and see if I'm missing something elsewhere. I'll have to count front cover bolts again but I agree definitely not oil pan and I think it's larger than any front cover bolt.

Thanks for checking!

 

That is a bellhousing bolt, 4 per side. Head and threads are the same as lower intake bolts but the intake bolts are shorter.