How hard to change valve cover gasket?

Got a tiny leak onto exhaust manifold. Only smell it when I mash the pedal and crank pressure goes up, not enough to leak onto driveway. I have the gasket, but shop says it's a two and a half hour job. I've got a service manual and was a decent DIY'er back in the day. Any advice?

Piece of cake....no real surprises other than the cover sometimes being difficult to get off. Replace the spark plug hole gaskets also. Figure whole job takes about an hour and you'll barely get your finger nails dirty.

Thanks! Plug gaskets came with the VC gasket.

You should also get new bolt grommets. (I think there are 15 of them, they get really hard and brittle)

Thanks for that, rrsperry! I was perusing my Service Manual last night and there were not specific instructions, but shouldn't be too hard to suss it out.

Also, you need to put a small dab of dilicone on the 1/2 moon cam cutouts at the back of the head.

Hey to a fellow nutmegger... It's a pretty easy job. good time to change plugs and check the coil boots too. Only thing I had to watch for was the 'rubber bumpers' on the edge of the cover..... tendency to fall off.

How does the Museum look??? Haven't seen much information after the initial reports.

Thanks for the advice! At 78,000 miles I should probably do the plugs while I am in there, I reckon.

Museum looks bad, but the FD saved everything inside, so should be back to square one in a few months.

One of the easiest DIYs on our cars. We have replacement gasket sets below...

Click HERE for more information.


Please let us know if you have any questions! Feel free to shoot me a PM or email.

Best,
Joe

mine started to leak right after 60k, I mean like 60200 miles, kind of disappointed about it - 160k I would understand, but 60? I happened in the rear left corner.

I discovered that soon enough (hate the stinking smell of the burning oil, and can smell it from a distance) so when I stated working on it it did not get to drip on the ground but it begun to fry on block.

Anyway, it was tricky to remove the cover since the gasket was attached pretty hard, but the worst was still ahead. the gasket hardened so bad that it was almost like plastic and when I was removing the seals over the spark plugs, the part of connecting piece separated itself between the rings. I got hot and cold chills immediately. Since it happen between the rear plugs I took cosmetic mirror and stated to look for it. Luckily it was big enough 1x1". If I missed that little "tick" sound, the damage could have been terrible. I have inspected the old set to make sure that nothing else fell off.

Some say to apply the sealer only on the moon shapes but I applied a very thin layer all over. Drove for a weak without the upper plastic overs over the engine and tightened just a 0.5-2 mm again. So far so good.

Thanks for the warning! The instructions I found online say it is a difficulty level of 4 on a scale of 1 to 10; with 1 being checking the air in the tires and 10 being an engine rebuild. I don't have the patience and skill I did as a teenager, so will probably use a local independant shop that usually costs half of what the stealership charges for the same job.