so the fancy little tool kit from amazon showed up Friday and was actually really good. better have been for the money. decided not to pull the pan, and it looks like i got the sealed up quite well!
removing the old wear sleeve turned out to be a non-issue. the CAT chisel trick was right on. nice sharp chisel and beat a line across the sleeve without cutting it, expands it. do 2 or 3 lines and it slid right off by hand. actual no-fuss job. my crank turned out to have one hell of a groove in it, so a new sleeve was 100% necessary.
installing the seal with the sleeve in it to the housing was a little sketch though. keeping the sleeve from falling out, keeping everything from getting dirty or oiled or anything from the rest of the shop, etc. then not touching it while trying to RTV the seal surfaces and get the gasket stuck was also a trick. but then installing the housing/seal together on the engine with the tool was surprisingly slick.
for the oil pan seal, this is what i did ... in order to make sure the oil pan seal didn't bias the main seal at all, i cut the paper gasket out entirely. make sure you don't press down too hard on the pan or you'll start ot break the seal pan-to-block and she might leak later. i brake cleaned everything VERY well (without getting any in the pan), then primed the oil pan surface and the bottom of the seal housing with RTV. just a super thin layer to totally cover the entire surface, and a few globs in the corners at the block. i didn't do this, but nest time i would put a small line of RTV along the back side of the pan rail behind the holes for the housing to draw into/past. the primed surface should make it stick really well. i then installed the seal/housing and tightened the bolts to the block to make sure the seal was perfectly centered. once it wasn't going anywhere, i packed RTV between the pan/housing like i was packing bearings. that work better than i thought cuz it started to come out the bolt holes. at this point i left it for 24hours with the pan bolts only just touching, not even fully finger tight. this would give the RTV a chance to cure thick and be crushed by the pan bolts later to hopefully expand and seal better. (the package even recommended this) sure enough, it sealed up great! but had to RTV the head of the bolts since i didn't get any behind them.
no chances this time, got the flywheel on and started that junk to run in my garage for an hour while i worked on other stuff. i tried to rev it up some here and there as i would walk past to keep things changing. 1h dry and back together she went ... again.
vid:
https://i.imgur.com/5I1bRwU.mp4
