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’95 Civic LX, not a CR-V. That said, my thought is that the overall torque value is already off, so since you have to replace a broken stud and bolt anyway, I’d suggest backing the other bolts off in reverse sequence as a proper Honda service manual would direct you to do. It’s not as if you’d be in significantly less deep if you tried to just extricate the two snapped-off fasteners. It’s only four more to do it ‘by the book’, without regrets, as you’ll be taking the tension down and bringing it back up gradually and evenly, compensating for the sudden alterations from the breakages. Does it really matter? I’m not an engineer, but my Honda service manual weighs about six pounds, and Honda’s engineers are fond of torque specs and patterns. Just sayin’. :whistle:
It’s probably misinterpretation on my part, or maybe you wrote in haste, but your math seems odd. You say the bolts need 16 lb.ft., though you broke both a 7 lb.ft. acorn nut stud and a 16 lb.ft. bolt with the torque setting of 13 from the spark plugs. :dry:[/color]
Not being a wiseass, I urge you to not be lazy about this. Six bolts? It sounds like you either have the physical manual, a CD-ROM, or maybe a PDF of the tightening sequence. Find it from Honda, not aftermarket — no offense to ‘them’ — and expend the extra effort, which should be nominal. You sound like a ‘torque nut’, and I value that 😛 , so go the extra step.
I’ll leave you with a final thought from me, and a quote from someone else. Get the bolts from Honda — a local dealer, eBay, or an online Honda parts site. I’ve used Honda Parts Unlimited and several others. You were likely planning to do that, anyway. B) “If you don’t have the time to do it right the first time, when will you have the time?” Kick it in the ass, and keep distractions to a minimum! 😉
If the repair is going to cost you 1/4 of the 6-grand Kelly Blue Book value — which is given far too much credence, as it reflects ‘For Sale By Owner’ hopefulness and not hardball dealership-level value — and you still owe $3,ooo, it would appear that you have an otherwise reliable car that is essentially ‘worth’ what you’ve been quoted for repair costs: $6,000 perceived value, minus $3,000 owed, minus $1,500 for repair that you might not recover by padding the asking price, equals a 1,500-dollar car that’s nearly a decade old.
155,000 is arguably nominal mileage if the car hasn’t been beaten mercilessly or horribly neglected, such as with regard to oil level and changes. Unless you’re less fond of the car than you say, I’d suggest keeping it as long as the downtime for repair isn’t unmanageable. If you might be able to gain long-term access to another ride — preferably in the form of a borrowed rig, not begged taxi service — I’d still suggest taking on the repair task yourself, provided you have the facilities to permit it, given the likelihood of incremental progress.
It sounds like you have the aptitude to do the job if so inclined. That said, being a bit cynical, may I presume that you received an honest estimate from a reputable shop? Did they diagnose, or did you? Leak-down and compression tests, or guesswork from charlatans? It just pays to be sure rather than paying to be disappointed. :dry: Before I started doing my own repair work — far from being a pro — I had a head gasket replacement done by a licensed mechanic who was highly recommended by an overbooked friend who is a fine mechanic. To add insult to injury, my car ran horribly after about a week in the shop for an expensive repair that I expected would cost $500 or $600. It cost both. $1,130 for an admittedly lasting repair that inexcusably came with a lot of collateral crap.
My figures aren’t exact, but I recently heard about a guy who was quoted something like $6,000 to replace a lifter in a Mercedes with over 100,000 miles on it. Kudos to him, for as a guy with no prior mechanical experience, he garaged the car and spent eight months gradually DIY-ing his way through the repair with the help of YouTube tutorials — all for the cost of materials, which was a mere fraction of the repair quote. Just sayin’.
If you can reconsider and find the means to do the work yourself while maintaining mobility, I’d say to keep the car. My long-winded ‘2-cents’. B)
Thanks, college man. As a quick aside, I was peeved twice already when the site dumped two comments I was writing. Live and learn, I guess, but what’s been written shouldn’t have to be ‘clicked and saved’ just to protect it from a data dump when scrolling or trying to enter it in the text field. I don’t expect that to change. :unsure:
Anyway, in my ‘lost letter’ I was asking if you or anyone else thought that 260,000-mile axles could have worn significantly at the inner spline junction to cause enough ‘play’ to allow a gradual seepage of oil from the differential. I know that the inner joint itself is designed for a considerable amount of all-axis, 360-degree movement to accommodate real-world driving environments, but my last thought is that perhaps some wear-induced wobble on the end of the axle where it’s seated in the casing might result in the leaks I’m seeing.
I’ve tried a few installation tool improvisations, the best of which seem to be adaptations of two different receiver cups from a ball joint/u-joint service kit I ‘borrowed’ from Advance Auto for about $200. My biggest problem is the inability to evenly and squarely drive the seals with certainty, since I’m underneath and can’t see the top of the seating area while working the seal in. I’m stopping at my first instinctive impulse this time, and I’m using some Permatex HIGH TACK Gasket Sealant. These seals need some urging to get started, but my GreenGrease may have set me up for an accidentally crooked overly deep inset that I couldn’t recover from, making me even out the seating and drive them too far.
I’ve been waiting for the sun to get my area up to our high temp today, and I won’t see much improvement over where it is now, so I’m heading out shortly to pull seals and check bearings. Got the NinjaCivic up on stands and mostly ready yesterday afternoon, but darkness and strong wind convinced me to hold out for today. Thanks again for any additional thoughts on this! I think I’ve taken matters logically further than anyone else I’ve read about doing who’s had the same issue. 🙂
Sincerely,
BillOnce again, I’m no pro, but here’s my additional 2¢.:
— If you feel a ‘bind’ it’s probably from the compression you’re building by turning the engine, which exists even when rotating everything by hand. You’d feel a ‘release’ as the pistons pass Top Dead Center, or ‘TDC’. When being turned by hand, an engine that has enough power and compression to run at thousands of RPMs and move a 3,000 lb. car down the road at high speed will feel ‘tight’ as you get pistons up to TDC. Loosen all of your spark plugs and compression won’t be a hindrance.
— To my knowledge there is no need to mark your old timing belt, unless you’re using a shortcut method for changing it — which could be an easy way to miss a cam tooth or two and have an engine that runs horribly if at all, resulting in a whole lot of @^%##$*&^!! after you’ve reassembled everything. I think that’s essentially what happened when I had a guy replace my head gasket, only to have a SUPER-crappy-running car right out of the shop. Your timing belt is the proverbial glue that holds everything together. As critical as it is, it’s really rather generic — until it breaks, jumps teeth, or gets tensioned over misaligned pulleys. :pinch: Use your timing marks. It sounds like you’re understandably a bit intimidated, which has you counting on using your old belt as a guide. If you make shared marks on the old belt and each pulley at one tooth and groove junction on each rotating part, that should work, assuming the engine runs well now. You have to count belt teeth between points of reference with this method, or you could have a belt that’s offset from the start, and an engine with timing that’s way off. My non-pro opinion is again to set your timing marks absent the belt. Your belt should go on AFTER your assurance that all of your timing mark alignments have been made properly. I made my adjustments with the belt off, as I had to slightly jerry-rig my timing belt pulley and crank pulley after dimming lights and a fluttering battery icon in the dash cluster led me to discover a loose crank bolt, a wobbling pulley that I could effortlessly spin by hand, and the delightful surprise of a missing key. Provided you have the correct part, your new timing belt is just a clone of the old one. Your timing and cam pulleys don’t care where any of the belt’s indistinguishably similar teeth are — but your engine and computer care a whole lot about where all of the mechanical components are relative to one another. 🙂 The only mark I put on my timing belt was one dot on the side, which I mirrored on the cam pulley with another dot, both of them three teeth out from the point of cam and belt engagement near the top of the cam pulley. This was for tensioning purposes. The crank pulley is held in place while the camshaft is rotated the span of those three teeth, then the tensioner is allowed to settle into place and its tightening bolt is torqued down. The freewheeling of the system, so to speak, that you’re concerned about should be done after the new belt is on. Per service manual instructions, I gave mine a few gentle full rotations to make sure that the belt wasn’t walking off of the cam and that the timing marks remained aligned. Again, a ’95 Civic LX is a cousin of the ’04 Pilot, not its twin.
— With a clockwise-rotating engine you could use the ‘starter bump’ to easily loosen the crank bolt. Snugly fit your ratchet on the bolt and get the handle to SECURELY rest against the frame up and behind the engine, or fit it with a cheater extension wedged under the jack stand you had better be using on that side. B) An anvil, no joking, would work. Ha! Some people just brace the handle against the floor in front of the car. The point is to oppose the direction of rotation of the engine. This only works with clockwise-turning crankshafts, which is why I mentioned engine rotation direction earlier. Once the wrench is tightly set up, give the ignition a literal pulse — just enough to engage the starter for a split second. Don’t start the car. The formidable torque of the starter motor should make light work of your crank bolt. 😉 Not for nothing, if you have the bolt in so tightly that you can’t muscle it back out, I highly doubt that anything ‘slipped’ when you made your initial spin of the whole shebang. If your marks were accurate, they should still be. However, you will be putting the woodruff key in, so it can’t hurt to check or even re-do everything. I err on the side of caution. As the old carpenter’s adage goes, “Measure twice, cut once.”
— If the Pilot doesn’t need to roll every day to take care of business, put the timing belt project on hold and get an OEM service manual from Honda. No offense to the likes of Haynes or Chilton, but if you like your Pilot enough to do your own work on it, splurge for a factory-authorized manual. Your Pilot’s owner’s manual may have ordering information inside the back cover. Helm used to print Honda’s manuals. They may still. Online Honda parts sellers may have them. I highly recommend Honda Parts Unlimited, which is the online presence for Bell Honda in Phoenix. They’ve been great to me. Just sayin’. B) I’m sure eBay would yield some results, and there are some legit manuals that people have painstakingly uploaded to the Internet, too.
I applaud your determined effort. All the best to ya, and I hope I’ve at least given you some useful direction, or at least a boost of inspiration. 🙂
Peace,
BillI had a more detailed reply, but the damned system took me off the page when I tried to scroll up, so I lost it all. :angry: No time now to recapitulate. Check out this forum — http://www.piloteers.org/forums/69-2003-2008-pilot/29329-removing-crankshaft-bolt.html
YouTube has some good videos. I saw a search result for your bolt removal issue, uploaded by some guy named Alexy. I think Gravilov or some such thing is his last name. If your timing belt never came off, the timing points should be the same. My Civic has marks on the cam pulley indicating ‘UP’ and points at due right, left, and down to identify piston position. See if the Pilot is similar. Be careful with clockwise rotation if your engine is mounted with belts on the left, or driver’s side. Many Hondas have this design and are counter-clockwise in rotation, so the ‘starter bump’ bolt loosening method doesn’t work on them and can be dangerous because it would attempt to tighten the bolt. There’s a special removal tool to fit the hexagonal recess which I believe the Pilot’s crank pulley has. Get imaginative if you can’t get the tool in time. 😉 I’d also caution against much clockwise rotation with the timing belt on if the Pilot’s engine is indeed one with a counter-clockwise configuration. I hope this is accurate and helpful input. Hopefully someone with truly authoratative information will chime in in a timely manner. Gotta go. Make it happen! Peace! 🙂