[Cruisin428]

What do you use to hunt a vacuume leak? I see starting fluid, soap, etc. and do you expect it to idle up or down.

I want to double check and hunt for any leaks.

What about exaust leaks while we are at it! If you say just listen for an exhaust leak, you dont know how loud this car is!

[cgrey8]

The last intake vac leak I had wasn't on my V8 converted truck. It was on my 97 Ranger's 4.0L. Apparently Ford put odd-shaped rubber O-rings in between the top and bottom pieces of the intake which eventually go bad and allow enough leaking that the computer throws error codes. It's a common enough problem that people on the Internet knew about it and directed me to that. I pulled the intake, gooped a bunch of gasket-in-a-tube onto it and fixed the problem. But I didn't find it with water, starter fluid, or sound. I was just crossing my fingers that the collective wisdom in the series-of-tubes was guiding me right in that instance...and it did.

As for exhaust leaks, the V8 has had it's share of those. Header bolts LOVE to come loose on my truck apparently. I was going through exhaust gaskets about once every few months until I got fed up with replacing them and decided to try something else. When they did go bad, it was sound that clued me in that there was a leak. And I confirmed the leak by seeing the black stains below the affected runners where the exhaust was being pushed out. What fixed this for me was to put high-temp gasket-in-a-tube on the threads of the header bolts. Locktite didn't hold'em! That trick lasted on the 302 until I pulled it (70+kmiles). And it's been successful with the original set of gaskets on the 331 (40+kmiles). I also bought header bolt lock washers from MrGasket. The problem with them is they are so thick, I had to buy longer header bolts to use them. And they work so well, you wind up cracking many of them if you ever need to remove the headers, as I had to do to get the 302 out and put the 331 in. My headers have 2 tubes with an annoying bend that bends right over the top of the header bolt hole preventing me from using the longer bolts in those locations, so I rely wholly on the silicone-on-the-threads for those locations. Annoyingly, it was always those locations that loosened first, most likely because I couldn't get them as tight due to the angle I had to wrench them at. Anyway, look for the black soot stains below the header tubes. If you see stains, you have a leak.