Having some issues with the old girl, she's been losing water from the rad overflow, about a litre per run, but i've noticed that the rad cap had a very weak spring, so i replaced it with the correct item . After a couple of runs I checked it and sure enough, no water loss, happy days
So today i decided to sort out the rocker cover oil leak (it's one of many, but i though i should start at the top), took off the oil filler and was dismayed to see it full of creamy sludge, it hasn't been like that before, always was clean and good so I can only assume that the pressure of the new rad cap has shown up some other faults in the system....bugger
Anyway, always one for a cheap fix, I thought that I could try and torque down the head bolts a little more, cant hurt and might sort out the issue ( i've done it before and it's helped keep an old engine running a bit longer from time to time, and the viva head bolts dont have a huge torque setting anyway) so I got out the torque wrench and set to work. First bolt I touched wasn't even tight! I worked round the lot and found a total of 4 bolts were pretty much 'hand tight' , jeez...how did it run? and it ran pretty good to be fair, so I've done them all up to around 60Nm, which is just a touch tighter than they should be (43 lbft = 58Nm), I didn't get a chance to road test the old girl after i'd done so i'll take her out tomorrow and see whats what
oh, one of the head bolts is a torx head thing, not what I expected to find, i'm guessing that the previous owner had a little trouble with one of the bolts and this was a replacement, whether it's a 'helicoil' one or just something they had lying around I don't know, but this was one of the tighter bolts so it must be doing the trick