Super Rookie's First Job at Jake's House

The first Saturday at Jake's house was tense. I don't think he was too happy to start from scratch in helping the rookie of rookies repair his truck. After I got there, he didn't really say hi or anything as we walked to his garage. Before we did anything to the truck, he said "First things first, shut the **** up and listen to what I say. I'll help you if you're willing to learn. If you're not willing to learn then you can have your truck towed back and get the hell out of here." I don't think I breathed for the next 2 hours. We did some small stuff like adjusting the points on the distributor, adding a spacer to the carburetor, and even replacing the valve stem seals.

My Truck Outside Jake's Garage

Me polishing something with a drill in Jake's garage.

My old engine without valve cover.

The next pictures are of the valve stem job. Now, you have to understand, this was a band-aid to get the engine to stop smoking. The valve stem seals were trashed, but unfortunately so was the engine. If you look closely at my engine with no valve cover, you can see a lot of crusty black. That's not good. It looked like somebody had mixed molasses and 2 lbs of black paint chips and threw them inside my engine. It should look fairly shiny with oil dripping around everything, not crust and burnt oil chips. But I didn't have any cash, so this was my way to get that truck back on the road without leaving a smoke screen. Here are the rest of the pictures for replacing the valve stem seals.

I did get dirty for once.

Good thing: Inline six is basically indestructible.
Bad thing: Stuff in the back is hard to reach.

The top pieces are rocker arms. The pushrods transfer the motion from the camshaft (which sits in the block in that type of engine) and the rocker arms transfer that to the valve stems while the valve springs return the valve to the close position. 
***My friend James helped me remember this process.***

The string you see was tediously shoved into the spark plug hole to
help stop each cylinder so we could take the valve springs off.

The spring surrounds the valve. The sticks in front are called rods.
Rods help to deliver the oil back to the head of the motor.

Crusty rocker arms

I learned a lot from this experience. As usual, Jake helped me tremendously to learn about the various parts of an engine, and how to repair or replace them. I gradually went from barely knowing what a spark plug was to how rods, lifters, valves, and rocker arms worked.