The manual seems very vague in this area. Basically I'm taking each head off to see where my smoke is coming from. Mind you just about all the nuts (cam cover, water manifold, etc) have been finger tight so the smoke from the engine bay is either oil or steam from a leak. Incidently, should the oil drain from the cam casing? When I took the cam cover off, there were puddles of oil lying by the cam and this was just below the edge of the cam case. There was no gasket sealant on the gasket, woudl you recommend using some blue? Anyway I'll investigate that further but back to the chain....

How do you take the chain off to get the head off? The book mentions removing the rubber bung (which I managed to break trying to do) and inserting a special jaguar part it nicely refers to as a screwdriver! into the hole. The another tool to release the tension. Does this mean that if you want to take the head off that does not have the rubber bung you have to strip the other side down too? I was going to do both anyway as I have a full gasket set but one at a time. As far as I can see you can only get the cam cover off by removing the inlet manifolds.
Also I could see no way of taking the manifolds off from the head so I split it down from the downpipe. Boy that was a tough job wothout a lift, dust and dirt in the eye every few seconds, some bits are just so badly designed to be accessed, it would be tough with a lift as well!! Got it done though, think I'll invest in a narrow socket set...This car is costing me in tools :)
Help appeciated
Cheers
Shaun
73 V12 OTS

Submitted by mcload@ev1.net on Wed, 03/26/2003 - 08:37

Shaun: Sorry I won't be much help as I'm a 6-cylinder man, but I'm confused on why youÆre removing heads to find out where smoke is coming from. I would assume you'd do this while the engine is together and running, looking for oil leaks. Perhaps you're referring to smoke out of the exhaust? Anyway, in regards to cam covers, yes, there should be gaskets. I've personally never had any long-time luck with blue silicon. I still use Permatex #2 on both sides of a paper gasket; messy but it works. Be sure to wipe off excess that squeezes through with alcohol.

Good luck; I'm sue a 12-banger expert will address the disassembly. Actually, I recall being able to remove the head without removing the chain. I first firmly wired the chain to the cam sprocket so it wouldn't slip a tooth. I then removed the sprocket from the cam and was able to extract the head. Unless you need to replace the chain, I'd find a way to keep it in place.

Patrick McLoad
JC Houston