As some of you may know already, I am under strict orders from the wife to not drip oil on the drive. I've got a dry belt primary drive now but there is still one leak left, the leak from the rocker box, which had to be tackled.
Usually there was just a little smear of oil on the head from the rocker box, no real problem, it didn't turn into drips. However, I tightened up all of the screws/nuts securing the rocker box and hey presto it got worse....What the heck? Talking to an A10 friend of mine last night, he said his rocker box leak got worse after tightening the fixings like I did, but he couldn't face the hassle of stripping it down and fixing it.
Today I decided I had to bite the bullet and take the rocker box off to see what was going on.
The photos below explain it all. Somehow tightening (over?) the fixings had squashed the gaskets out from their seats. The locations of the errant parts of the gasket were of course not readily apparent until the strip down. On one photo the pencil shows where the gasket had leaked and on the other it's pretty obvious.
Now 4 of the fixings are associated with fixing the engine top to the frame, so there is a tendency (well for me anyway) to make sure they are tight.
Hope this helps someone.
Alan
ps apologies for the way I spelt 'squashed' on the photo titles