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Valve Cover gasket/OIL Control Vale

DIY: 
5K views 4 replies 4 participants last post by  knsaber 
#1 ·
So if you look at this picture my oil control valve was leaking...I know a few people have had this issue but I decided to fix it. Now, firstly if you search for this replacement part you will get a ton of hits with parts that simply don't fight our cars. However, you will get parts that range from $30 to $200 that do fit. This time Amazon garage really pulled it through with some accurate year+model+part matching. I spent $181 for mine...and I bet I could have gotten it A LOT cheaper even from the local parts store. Our cars drink enough oil as it is. So that was motivation for me to change the OCV, simply because I didn't want to loose any more oil between changes.



Okay so a lot of colors here.
yellow: bolts
red: things to un-clip or remove so you have access
greenish: duh things you need to remove like oil dip stick
blueish: the spark plug bolts
You have about 10-12 (yellow) head gasket bolts. Two of these a pretty tricky, both are far driver side. You need to use an extension to access these and remove the tubing that is coming from the throttle body and the metal plate that has its own short bolt. Both those things are circled red.


I also removed this tube from the air filter. The other end was far too difficult.



If you want a closer look on these evil clips some of them were very difficult. I will admit I could only get one side pushed in. When that happened I just pulled the rest through. At the end the clips still worked. There are several of them and you really don't get a massive amount of space when undoing them, but just enough to help you out.


When you lift the cover off DO NOT USE A SCREW DRIVER OR ANYTHING ELSE TO WEDGE THE THING OFF you will damage the engine head. Its a good sign if the cover is some what hard to lift up. Just wiggle it on all sides. Driver side to the hood and on the back side by the timing chain there is a little lip that helps with lifting it up.

When you remove the cover try pulling it back to the trunk and then diagonal back towards the driver seat. You really don't have a lot of room to remove this sucker.
You can see the OCV on the left and the one screw holding it down. You also can see the gasket seal that is actually attached to the engine. The gasket is attached to the engine side because of the rubber sealant you add later.

You can see the timing chain which is nice and the old RTV sealant. Now, this stuff isn't that hard to remove BUT you need to scrape it off with a razor or something thin. I wouldn't use a flat head screw driver. When you remove it make sure you scrap away from the chain simply because you don't want large chunks falling in the area. There are four places RTV is used and you should see those locations. Front and back of timing chain and the exhaust cham shaft which is on the driver side.


Place the new gasket seal in the head cover AFTER you wipe off all the old oil. You will see these x marks only for the front of the gasket. This is where you place the rubber sealant but you still need to place it on the three other locations, two of them are shown of the diagram below.



When you reinstall everything it is pretty simple. HOWEVER, the torque lb is EXTREMELY light on the cover head screws. Only Tightening torque
4.5—7.0 N·m {46—71 kgf·cm, 40—61 in·lbf}
It is almost hand tightened and then a twist and thats about it.
 
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#2 ·
I forgot to mention that when you put the rubber sealant you only have about 10 minutes to place the cover. When you tighten the bolts you need to tighten them just like you would changing a tire, back-front, left-right, top-bottom, etc.
 
#4 ·
I have a VERY slight seep there, and in addition there's a SLIGHT amount of seepage on the valve cover gasket itself.

Not bad enough for me to warrant changing it out yet.... but I do give everything a once-over when I change the oil.

At ~165,000 miles it's one of the cleanest engines in terms of leaks and such I've owned.
 
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