i'm doing my timing belt on my 95 celica gt [5sfe] and figured i'd replace the oil pump o ring while i was in there. putting it back together, i packed it with petroleum jelly as per conventional wisdom. unbeknownst to me, a little got in the top middle hole, so when I was bringing the body cover bolts up to torque, the bolt broke and i had to drill it out. that sucked.
that's how i discovered that lube affects torque. the Haynes manual says little about this other than in the very beginning where it says torque values are for dry unlubricated threads unless otherwise specified.
I think that petroleum jelly is a much more effective lube than motor oil for bolt threads because of its viscosity, and could probably be similar to some waxes for which you are supposed to cut the torque by 50%!
so i took it apart and washed all the parts, and will now try again, using some higher grade bolts i picked up. I used q-tips to try to clean out the bolt holes as much as possible. I then used 91% isopropyl alchohol on the q-tips as a degreaser, followed again by dry q-tips. an experiment i did showed me that neither isopropyl nor acetone seems to be a very good solvent for petroleum jelly. this sorta makes sense to me since they are both fairly polar molecules.
my thought then was maybe i should put some dawn dish soap liquid on the q tips, then use dry q-tips again, then wet, then dry. the problem is that it seems like many q tips have been required to get the bolt holes sorta clean and i noticed that when i push one of the q-tips into the top middle bolt hole, i can see it stretch the gasket behind the oil pump, in the area above the upper left bolt hole.
It looks like 5 of the bolts that hold the oil pump body cover on comprise about half of what holds the oil pump to the engine block. without them, it's possible that the seal is not holding and that oil keeps seeping into the 5 aforementioned bolt holes. I'm worried that dawn or degreaser put in those holes could seep into the engine and make a big mess. Perhaps this is why the Haynes manual and alldata both require removing the entire oil pump (which is a ridiculous pain in the ass).
so, should i attempt any further degreasing, or should i just put it back together and risk that some of the bolts will be over torqued? is that likely to lead to a leak?
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degreasing oil pump bolt holes
Cheers!
i don't know how that would be the case, but it is black and stretches when i put the q tip in the top middle hole like i was saying. that being the case, brake cleaner would damage it, correct? that's why i went with alchohol at first.
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