Ode to a Delta 88

O what a frustrating piece of shit you are.

Who knew? Who could possibly have known?

Here is a list of things I am not:

Politician
Florist
Veterinarian
Banker
Doctor
Hippie
Bricklayer
Freemason
Mechanic

I lament only the last.

A mechanic would have looked at you and said “Fuck this.”

Actually, a mechanic would have looked at you and said, “Yeah, I can fix that.”

I looked at you and said, “How hard can it be?”

Getting your fat ass on the trailer to take you home and tuck you cozily into my garage for the next five months, I noticed 1 out of 8 cylinders had taken the day off. Also, an interesting blue cloud was wafting oh so gently from underneath your vast hood.

“No problem,” thought I. “Bad spark plug. Surely nothing more involved than that.”

After you ran for a while in my driveway, though, did I detect the sickly-sweet aroma of overheated antifreeze? Yes, I did. And when I checked under your cursed radiator cap, did I notice that your coolant level was low, indicating a latent internal leak? Indeed. And when, in an act of final desperation, after new plugs and wires and distributor cap and rotor had failed to awaken that 8th cylinder, did I perform a compression check only to find that cylinder #5 was fully offline and effectively compressionless? Sai, you speak only truth.

Is this a blown head gasket or a warped cylinder head? Is there any way to tell, really, with the meager tools and skill at my disposal? No. What other options, after my hubris, but to replace the cylinder head and hope for the best? None.

I shall address you now, O Treasured Reader, to avail you of the travails involved in replacing a cylinder head on a 307-cubic-inch V8. Should you choose someday to undertake the task yourself, dearest friend, be advised that the procedure is germaine to most V8s, but not necessarily identical.

To remove a cylinder head, first you must take off the intake manifold. To remove the intake manifold, first you must remove the carburetor. To remove the carburetor, first you must disconnect a legion of hoses and connectors. Whether they will find themselves back in their original and proper locations is as much your guess as it is mine. Why didn’t I take notes? Why didn’t I label? Why did I think taking digital photographs on the lowest possible resolution would suffice as a proper mnemonic?

Also, you must remove the valve cover. To remove the valve cover, you must first remove the alternator and power steering pump. To remove the power steering pump, you must first remove the heat shield. To remove the heat shield, you must first remove the air injector four-way crossover pipe. To remove the air injector four-way crossover pipe, you must first strip the holy Jesus out of the bolts holding the air injector four-way crossover pipe on because those bolts have been on since 1983 and aren’t going anywhere. To remove the air injector four-way crossover pipe despite the stripped bolts, you must get out your grinder and cut the sucker off. While you are doing this, you must also get a glowing-hot fragment of metal in your eye because you are too stupid to wear your safety goggles.

Also, you must remove the exhaust manifold. To remove the exhaust manifold, you must first jack up the front end of the entire vehicle and remove both front wheels. Then you must lie on your back in a puddle of a noxious mixture of freshly-spilled antifreeze and transmission fluid because you broke your creeper last week using it as a ramp to load your motorcycle on the trailer. Then you must disconnect the exhaust manifold from the header pipe to the catalytic converter. You must also get a nice big chunk of rusty metal in your other eye because you are still too stupid to wear your safety goggles.

Once you have done all of these things, you can remove the cylinder head—but only after you have removed all 10 cylinder head bolts, each of which requires the application of over 150 foot-pounds of torque. Only then can you remove the head and smash the shit out of your thumb with it against the inside fenderwell.

Reverse all these steps to reassemble. Add to the mix that the cylinder head weighs about seventy pounds, and getting in onto the block without scraping the shit out of the new head gasket is a near impossibility for one of my so-called skill. Have I compromised the head gasket now? After all this work, will the thing run for five minutes (if it runs at all) only to rupture the new head gasket and advertise this fact by spewing steam gaily out through the tailpipe? Also throw in the fact that the intake manifold bolts just barely don’t line up with the bolt holes, for reasons only God knows why. Also throw in the fact that the new intake manifold gasket is a flimsy piece of tin that bends if you look at it funny, and which also must be liberally spread with Silicone RTV, an orange sealing substance that looks a lot like a melted popsicle and smells a lot like shit mixed with puke. Don’t forget, as well, that the RTV sets up in 5 minutes, so you have about that long to hoist the 50-pound intake manifold on top of the engine and bolt it into place—only then to find out that the bolt holes don’t line up.

Ah, lovely carburetor, with your four varnish-enslimed barrels and your vast Medusa of vacuum hoses and sensor clips! How would I like to throw thee across the garage? Let me count the ways...well, I guess there’s really just one, but man would that be satisfying.

And here is where I sit, staring at the oil-encrusted engine bay and wondering what to do next. And here you sit, O dear Delta 88, with your dented bronze finish and the small scrapes along the tops of the fenders because I forgot to use fender protectors, your nose in the air due to the jackstands, lending you a haughty fuck-you air that mocks me still.

Was I thinking this would be easy? Was I thinking you, O delta 88, would cooperate with me at all? Was I really so naive?

Will you be so smug, dear Delta 88, when I finally get you to run and take you out to Sycamore Speedway and beat the absolute shit out of you with an enormous grin upon my face the entire time, high on the sweet nectar of revenge? Time will tell in the ways that only time can tell.