AC, Upper cover oil leak...

[Waterloo]

My 18 month old FleetPride OTR Chinesium AC compressor took a dump on me...

I had just pulled into the TA in Porter IN off of I-94 when it I heard it, needed a second set of eyes and ears on this to diagnose, as I just installed a new alternator, and at first thought it had already spun a bearing. Nope, alternator fine, AC clutch howling like a banshee... I asked how much, they said $750. I laughed. How much for a new compressor? $350 Delco, 1 year warranty. They wanted $400 on top of that to install 3 pounds of freon, excuse me, R134a, not allowed to call this stuff freon... $400 to fill the system, are they crazy? No, they get it all day long, the crazy folks are the ones that pay it.

I called FleetPride, and of course, it was out of warranty. He gave me his cost, $140, so that made the sting a bit better. 4 cans of R134a, $25. Installing here shortly. I asked about a new clutch, it is Chineseium, he did not have a part number as in no replacement clutch. Oh well.

I figured this would be a great time to repair my motors upper cover leak on the CM-871... I just finished throwing a new gasket in, let's see if the oil leak goes away. I put dye in the motor oil, and traced it down to the driver side, the first bolt from the top of the motor on the down side. I figured it would have been over at that stiffener plate, over towards the passenger side, nope.

I could not for the life of me see where the issue was with the gasket. I checked the torque on the bolts before removing, they were fine at 21 ftlbs. So, when I installed the new gasket I used a thin line of RTV on the outside of the gasket, not to much to flake off and fall into the motor, but just enough on the offending side, and up towards the center where the two ends of the string gasket meet.

If it holds, that will be great, if not I have to do it again. It was not to difficult of a job, I bought some metric bolts and cut the heads off to use as pins to support the plate as I wiggled it into place. Worked nicely. I had to take the intake side apart, including the crank case pressure box and the plate that holds it to the block. I did not need to remove the cooling system crossover from the thermostat, as there was just enough room to work around it. Fingers crossed, I hope the leak is repaired. What a mess. It took longer cleaning up the oil mess than to do the actual repair.

Going back out to install the AC compressor and put the motor back together on the intake side, had to take a beer break.