So today I was about to give up when I had an epiphany: What I if I turned the angled brackets behind the upper seals on the injectors around? I realized that I've had them backwards this entire time, so that when I tighten the nuts on the injectors down, the bracket has actually been pressing back on the electrical connectors. I'm absolutely certain that this is why I couldn't get a good seal-- there was little to no pressure coming from the brackets to press the seals into the engine. It seems like such an idiotic and obvious mistake to me now, and I really really wish that it hadn't taken me until now to notice it, because I've now created some much bigger problems.
After flipping the brackets around, the car still was starting but barely staying running. Before flipping the brackets, I had just tried tightening the nuts down as far as I could thinking that the tighter they were the better. I'm fairly certain that in tightening the brackets down backwards, I may have warped them the wrong way, and now they're not able exert as much force now that I have them in the correct position.
Additionally, a problem was created in that in desperately wrenching down on the nuts (and idiotically without washers), I locked them onto the threads, and when taking all but 1 of them out, the threads come out with the nuts. This wouldn't be a huge problem, but in tightening the first one back in, I just stripped out the threads on the engine completely. So I'm without a way of tightening down injector one.
I suppose it would be possible to re-thread this a bit bigger, but this also leaves me with the problem of adapting the bracket to fit a larger bolt.
It's fantastic how such small stupid mistakes have resulted in almost catastrophic problems. First the spark plug wires, leading to a burnt out starter, and now these backwards brackets I was so sure that when I flipped the brackets around I would finally have the car running. Boy was I wrong, I guess.
Intermittent Madness!
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BartusCompater
Re: Intermittent Madness!
After four months or so finally got the car running. I ended up saving around 2,000 dollars for a repair on everything. I figured I was looking at new threads on the intake manifold (or a new manifold), new injectors, seals hoses, and then quite a bit of labor on everything.
Turns out they didn't need to replace the injectors, the damaged tips were just caps I believe they said. Additionally, the total labor was only about $300, they got it done fairly efficiently it sounds like. On top of that, I had a bad relay which was preventing the fuel pump from working, which was what most likely caused my intermittent starting issues. This relay was about 100 dollars to replace. All in all, it came out a little under 500 dollars total and the car is running great.
The problem with my repair, they told me, was that larger upper seals which I got needed to be trimmed down before being installed so that the injectors would be able to seat correctly.
Anyway, car is back on the road. Even though it was down for all of summer I'm still really happy to be driving it again.
Turns out they didn't need to replace the injectors, the damaged tips were just caps I believe they said. Additionally, the total labor was only about $300, they got it done fairly efficiently it sounds like. On top of that, I had a bad relay which was preventing the fuel pump from working, which was what most likely caused my intermittent starting issues. This relay was about 100 dollars to replace. All in all, it came out a little under 500 dollars total and the car is running great.
The problem with my repair, they told me, was that larger upper seals which I got needed to be trimmed down before being installed so that the injectors would be able to seat correctly.
Anyway, car is back on the road. Even though it was down for all of summer I'm still really happy to be driving it again.