Hi everyone. Seems that every couple of years I'm re-installing the manifold gaskets on my 46. Its always a different spot that gives up first, but something always gives up. The manifolds appear to be flat when properly aligned and assembled, but I'm just laying them on a flat surface, not using something they would have down at the machine shop...although I vaguely remember having them checked out when I had the head gone through. Anyhow, while looking around the web the other day, i stumbled on Re**lex gaskets (don't want to be an advert). I haven't seen anyone mention them on here, but I went ahead and picked up a set just to try them out.
First off, they are expensive, If I don't get about 8 to 10 years on them I'm out whatever that pro-rates to compared to a 2 year cycle on the normal style gaskets. They are thicker than your usual exhaust gasket and have no metal, and are crushable to about half thickness. They offered the head to manifold gasket as one precut assembly, I did like this as it was slightly easier to keep everything lined up while sliding on the manifolds and getting the alignment rings started than the standard 3 part gasket set. They did not offer a pre-cut gasket to go between the intake and exhaust, so I ordered a small blank of the material and cut my own. The material is somewhat fragile especially to bending, but it is also fairly easy to cut with a utility knife. Everything went together as expected, and in less than 4 hours I had everything pulled, cleaned, cut, assembled, aligned, torqued, and re-assembled.
Truck fired up quickly, and no vacuum or exhaust leaks. Well ok, there was a real small one at the donut on the downpipe, its the same old regular material... Shutdown and loosened, reseated and re-torqued the downpipe, and restarted. No leaks. So far, I have about 15 minutes of run time on them, tomorrow I hope to venture into town for a real test. I'll let everyone know if they hold up or are best used to lubricate legless reptiles.
Check my gallery below for some photos of the install.
