I hope I didn’t do any damage. I scratched the surface a bit, but I’m planning to use the black high oil resistance silicone and pray it holds at torque specifications. I’ll use black silicone on the bolt threads too - a few threads back.

I removed just about everything, but the coolant port on the left was very tough. There’s still some black stuff on there and I think it’s adhesive. I’m going to see if a neighbor has acetone tomorrow. I know it’s hard to tell in these pictures, but if it looks like I’m on the wrong track with any of this, please let me know.

I’ll use brake cleaner to spray everything after and maybe an alcohol swab on the gasket surface. Afterward, I might spray the crank and cam from the front with WD40 just in case, then I’ll put the new chain on and turn the engine a few times by hand. I might tap the gears into place with a rubber mallet to be sure they’re all the way on when I know the chain is on correctly since it was tough to remove the chain - had to wiggle it around and finally it pulled off.

 

https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/dc/v000587077/

This is what I use for any aluminum parts, it prevents nearly any risk of damage and very quickly and easily preps a surface. One disk can do two heads easily. As far as the surface you have shown in the picture that is perfect and ready to be resealed, I would recommend you use Permatex RTV Ultra Grey for that since it is intended and OE speced for applications like timing covers and upper oil pans/bedplates. After you are done with mechanical surface prep use something like brake clean to blast everything off and have a perfectly clean and dry surface for your sealants.

 

It does look fine, as Im sure you will be putting on some sealer, but as a check runs a steel ruler over the gasket area just to check is true, with no high or low spots

 

Law, you could eat off of that. Looks great.

 

Thanks, I’ll try using a steel ruler to see if anything obvious sticks out to my untrained eye. I’m pretty confused since there are so many differing opinions on everything. I’d thought that there was a generally accepted method for most of this, but it seems people do all sorts of different things. Hopefully whatever I do will work too.

I bought black and red right stuff sealant last week and I planned to use the black stuff on the timing cover and the red stuff on the long water pump bolts to try to ensure against anything leaking. I was told to get the gasket from AB, which has sealant on it already rather than the paper gasket I’ve got from the front cover I’d bought from rockauto, but I’m unsure how the AB gasket will do if I use another sealant along with it, or if it’s not enough sealant to be good enough on its own in case I screwed up the surfaces cleaning them with green scotch brite. I was told to use scotch brite, so that’s what I did and later I was told only to use the red type… Hopefully I didn’t ruin anything. I used green scotch brite (briefly and pretty lightly, but it still scratched it) on the crank too since there was some stuff on it, possibly rust, dried oil or something.

I feel better about giving the paper gasket a thin layer on each side of black right stuff to hopefully compensate for anything that happened. I’ll have to get some of those discs to try cleaning parts up next time. I don’t think I’ll clean anything but gasket surfaces too thoroughly in case it just leaks immediately and makes a huge mess of everything all over again. I’m cleaning up the heavy oil goop though - plenty of that under there. I think some is power steering fluid since that system blew out and leaked heavily (I think it was the pump itself), but I can’t tell if there’s motor oil under there too.