Gebert530

Ok so I recently replaced my cylinder head on my 2001, everything started up fine and I had white smoke coming out from below the engine. I traced it down to where my exhaust manifold and my exhaust pipe meet. I have no idea what the correct term of this is. I replaced that gasket when I did the cylinder head since I fully pulled the exhaust manifold off. I very clearly have a leak at this connection since the white smoke was pouring out of that spot. Is there torque specs for those bolts? I ordered a walker 31625 gasket and I did not add anything to it. Do I need too? The white smoke stopped but I can smell exhaust strong right near my driver door still.

Dave51

I would pull the thing back apart and inspect the threads on the studs carefully. Make sure they're clean and intact. Refresh if necessary. Make sure the nuts go on by hand all the way on the stud before you reassemble. Put some anti-seize on there. Be careful with torquing because torguing can only be done once as the bolt is stretched and weaker than new (everybody reuses bolts, but don't blame me if it snaps).

dave1123

You have 2 manifolds with converters, right? How's the other gasket? Did you make sure the mating surfaces were clean? The smoke stopped because you burnt off the oil and stuff from inside the cylinders, but you still have leaks it appears. When we did my head, we just tied the manifolds to the fender to keep them out of the way, which didn't work so hot anyway.

Gebert530

my setup looks like this, I circled where my smoke was coming from. Everything at the engine was perfectly fine no smoke or leaks. Besides a heater hose I didn’t tighten the clamp on

dave1123

Oh, so it's the lower flange gasket you're talking about. My WJ is the only one I've worked on and that has the 2 converters and exhaust pipe as one integral unit from the 2 ball flanges to the downstream converter with no flange along the way. Because it doesn't come apart without a torch and a lot of work, we decided to leave it in the Jeep and work around it.

He had to break apart the ball flanges on the manifolds themselves when he put the new motor in. He said it was a lot easier to bolt the intake and exhaust manifolds onto the head before he put the head on. Easy, that is, with an engine crane. By hand, not so much.