[silver_pilate]

You know, it's funny...I can swap a motor in two days, drop, work on, and reinstall a tranny in about 5 hours, and my first intake swap just took an afternoon. But it's always the little things that should only take about 5 minutes that always end up taking hours.

Case in point:

Back when I dropped in my new motor, I reused the factory headers as I didn't yet have the funds to purchase some shorties. Anyway, I realized that one of the header to H-pipe flange bolts was slightly bent. No big deal, I'd had the H-pipe off before and it bolted back up fine.

Wrong.

I got the motor in (after fighting to get the tranny lined up) and we started hooking everything back up. By this point, my tranny had leaked a decent little amount of tranny fluid on the floor under the car, and we had spread that kitty litter crap around to soak it up. I get under the car and start to bolt up the H-pipe. I continued to try and bolt up the H-pipe; I continued to try to bolt up the H-pipe, and I continue to try to bolt up the H-pipe. I got the driver's side just fine, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the passenger side flanges to line up in the tight space. I used pry bars, hammers, giant screw drivers, everything. After about two hours of grunting and rolling around in tranny fluid and kitty litter, I said screw it, it'll have to get done later.

I proceded to button up the rest of the motor and was getting ready to fire it up when my friend said, "why don't you give that H-pipe one last try before you turn it over." I'm like, I spent two ******* hours on my back trying that crap...it's 12:00 am...oh what the heck, one last try.

I got under the car, took a long screw driver, positioned the flange on the flange bolts and tap....clink....holy crap....it's on. I tried for hours...and all it took was one freaking tap to get the thing on. I proceded to impact that SOB together before I gave it a royal cussing.

It's always the little things...fittings...flanges...starter motors...

--nathan