Good morning, everyone. My fiancee has a '97 Lumina with the 3100. Sparing you guys the long story, it is smoking white from the side of the motor nearest the firewall. She doesn't seem to be losing coolant (but I'm not 100% sure on that) and it doesn't smell like burning oil. The master cylinder looks like it's wet on the bottom side of it and there is a patch of rust there as well. I don't know if that helps at all. I'm looking for some ideas. The only hunch I have right now is the head gasket or a hose.

Thanks in advance, everybody.

 

No replies? Bummer. Well, I took it to a shop to confirm. It is the lower intake manifold gaskets, as usual. I am in the process of tearing down the top side and for some reason the fuel rail inlet is not coming out. Any ideas?

 

There's a retaining clip that needs to be unbolted. Follow the fuel feed pipe (fuel inlet, if you will) down to locate it.

 

Hey thanks, man. I will have to try that tomorrow. So you're saying to just UNC lip the retainer and move the rails off to the side rather than removing the rails from the tubing completely?

 

I don't think that's possible. You'll find that you cannot avoid disconnecting the fuel feed pipe and fuel pressure regulator from the fuel rail.

 

Ok, gotcha. That's what I thought; but in the picture above, you can see that I've unscrewed the fuel feed from the rail, but a friend and I were pulling pretty hard (as hard as we thought we could without breaking the thing) and the two wouldn't come apart. Is it supposed to be really tough to separate the rail and the feed?

The fuel pressure regulator was easy to remove and is disconnected (as you can see in the picture). in fact we have the injectors out of the motor and the fuel rail is free from the manifold (although that's tough to tell from the picture). I am taking another look at it today after work.

 

I was what you were talking about after i went and looked at it. The job is done now and I think everything is good to go. Thanks for the help, EinST.

 

Congrats and thanks for the update.