Hey, been reading the forum for a while, my first time posting. I found this 96 RS 3800 II back in Feb, broke down in the emergency lane on the interstate. Paid the owner for it, assuming bad motor & trans. Looked under the hood, the AC compressor bracket was broke and belt was off.

Made some minor repairs and got it running quickly. It had a valve tapping on the driver side. Passenger fender and ground effect kit was damaged. Misfire in number 5. And computer threw a transmission code for a faulty switch, slipping... but I can't feel it when I drove the car. It averages 24 mpg, to my surprise.

I just started pulling the heads off to replace all the gaskets. Water/oil are mixing in the cooling system. And this will give me a chance to adjust the valves. Hoping to complete the motor in the next 8 weeks, when money and time permits.

The car has 160,000 miles on it. I'm gonna replace the head gaskets & etc, coil pack, spark plugs & cables, O2 sensors, trans filter & gasket, oil filter, fuel filter, PCV and thermostat. Anything else I may as well do while I have the heads off? Should I be replacing the rocker arms, springs...?

 

have a valve job done while the heads are off. make sure to have them shaved to be sure they are not warped. should not need springs but that is something that is checked when valve job is done.

 

The tapping is most likely a lift. Since you have everything apart you might want to put a new set of lifter in. You want to replace the plastic elbow under the intake. I do not know where you are budget wise or skill wise but this would be a good time to put some headers on. If that is out of you budget you could pickup some manifolds and Y pipe of a 98-02. They have much better flow then the 96's stock manifolds. You will have to "splice" the two Y-pipes together since your 96 has O2 sensor in front of the cat and the 98+ do not.

 

Definitely replace that plastic elbow... $3.28 at Advance in the HELP section or $10-15 from a dealer, this little thing fractures commonly and is a pain to replace later. If you get headers, i've heard bad things about OBX headers so you probably want to avoid them.

 

What have you heard about them? The only probelm I have seen is the bolts they give you are too short.

 

I am gonna have a machine shop resurface the heads, headers & intake. The shop is gonna inspect the heads... worst case a head is cracked, they told me $160 for a new one.

I probally won't be doing much modding to this car. I plan on only using it as a weekend car, when the kids are at grandma. I'm gonna save up for an LT1 or LS1. I used to have a LT1 1994 Caprice. I'm not much of a mechanic, the hardest thing I've done in the past was replace the optispark twice on my Caprice, it wasn't to hard, just time consuming. I did it in a auto shop, where my brother in law worked so he coached me thru it.

The idler tensioner on this car looks more like a water pump then anything, with all them water passages running thru it. I've seen that plastic elbow, and yeh, it's a ***** to pull. I couldn't pull it a few months ago and ended up just leaving it in. Thanks for reminding me, now that everything is apart it should be easy to pull out.

I've got to replace the trans filter & gasket, check the differential... and remove the headers. What's the best way to jack the car up as high as possible. I've got 2 jack stands, 2 ramps and one jack, I can borrow another jack and 2 more stands. I should of just drove the car up onto the ramp when it was running. I don't know if I can push it up the ramp now that the car is apart. My jack won't raise the car up enough to work on the car comfortable. I've already gave myself a black eye, when I hit my head under the car, reacted and slammed my head against the pavement and reacted again and slammed my face against the body of the car again..... bad headache, don't wanna do this agian. I was thinking of raising the car, put it on a stand, then put a block on wood on the jack and raise it up some more, adjust the stand... repeat, repeat... Should I use two jacks to raise the car, one on each side, I'd hate for the car to fall off a stand and mess up the body. Thanks guys...

 

Hey man nice car. I too have a 96 rs 3800 project, alough I have to say the work on mine is a bit more in depth. I just blew a head and fried the alt and oil pump this past weekend so I will be starting my project a bit sooner then planned but its cool. I have a salvaged z28 that I'm doing a full swap with. Ill have pics up when I start. I got some pics of my ride in my profile check it out.

 

Me being a mod maniac I would suggest a cam swap for a zz performance gt1 cam since you've got the heads off, it works good with the stock springs. Definitely do a valve job and surface the heads, valve seals too. The head bolts are 1-time use, so I would recommend upgrading to some ARP head studs since you have to replace the bolts any ways. If you do pull the cam, replace the tensioner while you're in there. Felpro gaskets are what you want to get, don't use the blue felpro timing cover gasket though, they fail prematurely way too often, has to do with the surface differences between the aluminum timing cover and iron block. Use a GM paper gasket on that.

 

i would second what jazz says...plus hes one of the best modders ive seen for 6ers