Am I *cool* or what?! Well, actually, it feels more like a miracle...

This morning, I was still fighting with a stripped nut on the left exhaust
manifold, which didn't seem to be aligned with the head. I lost the fight
and moved on to other things; anyhow, a closer look with a flashlight
seemed to indicated that there is no gap between the head and the
manifold afterall.

I cranked the engine with the ignition disabled for about a minute. When I
let go off the ignition key, the engine still kept on cranking for about
5-10 seconds, which seemed rather weird. Thought about checking some
wiring, but decided that perhaps some relay overheated or something like
that. 

Thus reenabled the ignition and she started right up! Raised rpm to 2,000
and left it there for 10-15 minutes. During the first 5 minutes, the bus
was engulfed in whitish, stinky smoke, burning oil, I presume, a LOT of
oil. But this subsided.

There's also a pretty bad exhaust leak somewhere and I suspected the
exhaust manifold with the stripped nut (or stud?), but it's actually a
heat exchanger, even though I put in a new gasket. Will check it out once
the engine has cooled off a bit.

-- 
Sami ('75 Westf.)
dakhlia@wuecona.wustl.edu
http://wuecon.wustl.edu/~samid/