'02 Impala 3.4L Base 105K: Removing Injectors from Fuel Rail

How do you remove the injectors from the fuel rail on this car? I (unfortunately) removed the fuel rail as part of the LIM gasket replacement, and now on re-install I'm going ahead and replacing the O-Rings like the Helm manual says I should. Today I was really tempted to just slip on the lower O-Rings and forget about the uppers, but I had tugged on one injector so much that I was afraid I might have distorted the seal, which obviously is not good.

Also, and this might be an illusion, but while pulling on the one injector, the seal trying to come out didn't look like an O-Ring to me. It looked more like a wider, flatter, cylindrical sleeve (like a heating pad wrapped around your arm). The kit has 16 O-rings in it (all black in color), 8 thinner and 8 thicker. It looks like the thinner ones match up with the lowers I pulled off near the injector head. The thicker ones must go at the top, but like I said, it didn't look like an O-Ring that was trying to come out.

One last thing that you can weigh in on: the injector heads were full of black gunk (or even carbon), so I carefully scraped them around the perimeter with an awl and then cleaned them off with throttle body cleaner. It looks like each injector has two tiny spray holes in the center - and I could see them on each one, but I felt the need to get the crud off each of them. Was this a bad idea?

 

There should be a steel clip holding the injector to the rail. just pull it out the side and the injector should pull out. The upper seal is in fact on o-ring. It may be flattened slightly from being squished in the bore.
And it was a great idea to clean up the injector nozzles. If the gunk built up enough to affect the spray pattern, then you could have gotten a misfire.

 

shawnvw:

Thanks for the reply. Again, you're the only one responding.

Forgot to mention that I DID, in fact, remove the clip on the one I was trying to pull out. The clip has three "fingers" - one of which actually wraps around the rail (but doesn't actually grip it tight). The Helm manual depicted the clip as open-ended on one side and I could actually see this, so I pushed it the other way - but it wouldn't slip off completely (sliding diagonally it jammed on the rail). Had to bend one of the side clips to fully remove it (hope this is OK).

But then I pulled on the injector for quite a while without success. Maybe I need to spray it with throttle cleaner to help it slip out?

Found this picture on the web. Even though it says 3.8, this is what mine looks like (I'm pretty sure). At first I was sticking a small screwdriver on those notched tabs right near the plug hoping that would free it:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/NEW-F...spagenameZWD1V

The cylindrical sleeve-thing I was referring to must be the section between the notched tabs clip and the O-Ring. The O-Ring is at the very top of the injector, so you're going to see a bit of the tubular body as you pull on it before the O-Ring finally pops out. And it looks like this is the fatter/thicker O-Ring at the top, so that makes me feel better...

 

The bolt that holds down the fuel rail accually clamps down on the injectors holding them in place, the clip is just some added insurance.
Then bent clip can be fixed by just beinding it back, like I said, the rail accually clamps down on the injector.

Spraying the o-ring with the intake cleaner was going to be my next suggestion. spray it on, twist the injector as you pull it out. It should come out.

Good-Luck man