About six years ago I did the headgaskets on a friend's 94 pickup w/3VZE. This morning he calls me: no heat, white "smoke," you know...
After the car's driven for a while, the steam dies out, so I'm wondering if I could just re-torque the head bolts and call it good.
So, um, dumb question: what's the right way to do this? Loosen them up and start over? Just give them all a quarter turn? Do I need to replace the bolts?
He's only got 25k on the car since I did the work, so I'm feeling pretty E36 M3ty about this...
If they're torque to yield bolts, you will have to replace them.
I'd be inclined to put a bit more effort into figuring out why it's gone wrong so quickly though.
The way an old-school BMW mechanic told me to do it (head bolt retorquing was standard procedure with every valve adjustment on old BMW engines) was to set your torque wrench 10 pounds higher than the spec and try to tighten each bolt in sequence. If the bolts don't move, they are good; if they do, retorque (assuming they aren't torque-to-yield, in which case you'd have to replace them). Since it requires more force to start a static bolt moving than to keep one in motion during installation, this allows you to make sure the bolts are close to spec without disturbing them if they are.YMMV.
