I took a copy as well just in case thank you

 

Well guys.... I'm back!!! The cold spell is finally over, here in North Eastern Washington. God I hate the cold, nothing's worse when working on a rig. So pretty much all I have to do is reclean everything and slap the gasket on and torque the nuts down and let's set for the night. The weather really screwed me on this project for I don't have a shop or garage and I had to keep tarps over the rig so it wouldn't get internals all puckered up. Anyway if anybody's interested I'll keep this thread going for a little bit till I'm done to keep y'all posted. seawolf

 

Yes, keep posted. Good luck on putting it all together. At least all the parts are clean at this stage.

I'm south of you by about 2 hours and I can attest to the screwy winter weather we've had in this part of the country.

Was it part of this thread where the hint was posted of using studs to help align the intake manifold while installing it? If I had to do it again, I would have cut off the heads of the old intake bolts and used some of them as guides. That way there would have been no question as to whether or not the intake was installed down on the silicone on the front and rear of the block nice and square.

 

Yep, it sure was and I already got the heads cut off and .put on. Hey do you think I should put the RTV just on the ends of the block or all around the gasket? Thanks, seawolf.

 

My biggest concern the one that I'm worried about is putting the damn distributor back in. God I hope it lines up right.

 

You should not need any more RTV other than at the ends of the block except to overlap onto the heads about 3/16". Besides that is what the GM manual says. (See the attached file of the excerpt from my 1999 manual.)

Did you get the good Fel-Pro LIM gaskets with the metal carrier that holds the seals?

 

On mine when I tried to put the distributor back in, I was not able to get it in on the first try. After several more attempts, it got to where it would only go in 2 then three teeth off. It is really easy to notice when the distributor is off because there are only 13 teeth in the cam/distributor gears which translates to an offset of 27 degrees. What I figured happened was that the shaft for the oil pump got rotated a bit and the only way I could get the distributor back in was if it was off by a tooth or more on the cam gear.

Since I knew I had not moved the crank and I knew the direction the rotor was pointing before I took it out, I just had to take a really big flat-bladed screw driver to rotate the oil pump driveshaft back to where it would engage with the distributor when I put it in on the right tooth.

Looking at pictures of the distributor gears at RockAuto, I see that the pitch in the gears is such that the rotor will rotate about 60 degrees as it slides in so that you will want to start dropping it in with the rotor back-rotated by about that amount.

 

Yep I got to good Fel-Pro gaskets and man I just hope the distributor falls right in. Thanks christine_208!

 

You know, once I figured out why mine was not going in, it was pretty easy to realign the oil pump driveshaft with the screwdriver and get the distributor in correctly. You did record the direction the rotor was pointing before you removed the distributor, right?

 

Yep, used a scribe and marked the cap down the distributor to the block.