Replace Brakes, Air Filter, Valve Cover Gasket 1987 Honda Accord

This week has been pretty successful for automotive work. Bryn’s car has been needing some maintenance and it’s been warm enough this week to be outside and take care of it.

Bryn’s car is a West Coast 1987 Honda Accord DX with the carbeurated 2.0 liter 4-cylinder (it’s actually 1.996 Liters) so it’s in pretty good shape and worth maintaining. One of the guys at the parts shop couldn’t believe how good of condition it was in when he looked at it to determine which parts he needed to order.

On Thursday we replaced the air filter and valve cover seal. We went after the air filter because Bryn noticed his fuel mileage was getting worse, and I wanted to start at the top. If an engine can’t breath right it’s not going to run right. It’s a good thing we replaced the air filter because that thing was looking just nasty, it should have been done long ago and I showed Bryn how to do it so he can continue to maintain his own vehicles rather than having to pay people to do it.

As you can see in the photographs below the filter was jammed pack full of all sorts of nastyness so I was hoping that replacing the filter would give him some greater performance. Well, after all was said and done he didn’t think the performance felt much better at all. But at least his engine can draw in as much fresh air as it can use now.

Amazon.com Widgets

Valve Cover Gasket
We also replaced his valve cover gasket because he was getting some smoke out of the engine compartment. I could see where the oil was leaking down on top of the exhaust manifold and boiling off. There’s only one place on that engine that the leak could be coming from and that was the valve cover gasket. There was some oil mixed with crud around the joint where the valve cover meets the head of the engine and some wet oil, but no visibly flowing weeks. He ordered the valve cover gasket along with the air filter earlier in the week so we had both parts.

The valve cover gasket was old and crusty, and we could once we had the valve cover off where the oil had been leaking through the seal and onto the engine.

Unfortunately I did not take many pictures of this part but I can give you a run down description of how it went. These are just the steps we took and if you’re reading this and thinking of doing your own you may want to also refer to a manual like Haynes or similar. I can say that this description is more detailed. If you’re not interested in knowing how to do this you can skip down to the brakes pictures and stuff further down the page.

The valve cover comes off easily on most vehicles, the Accord was no different. The steps were as follows.

Remove the support bracket from between the valve cover and the air filter box, it’s held on with 2 10mm bolts on the air filter box and 2 10mm bolts on the valve cover.
Disconnect the crankcase vent hose from the valve cover. It’s held on with a spring clamp, then twisting the hose well pulling on it gets it off.
Temporarily move any throttle cables and vacuum lines out of the way. We used the air cleaner clips to keep them up and out of the way.
Remove the 3 cap nuts from the top of the valve cover, these hold the cover on. Make sure not to drop them into the engine compartment, we did and had to use a magnet on a stick to retrieve one.
The valve cover will be adhered well to the engine head you’ll need to carefully pry the valve cover off. I would recommend using a hard plastic tool as metal objects can gouge the mating surface on the head and keep you from ever getting a good seal again. A thin pointed object should work well, push it into the space between the valve cover and the head block to break the seal in several places then carefully pry upwards. Once the seal has started to separate the valve cover will pop off easily.
Make sure to note where the corner tabs were located on the old seal then pull it out, it’s easy to remove.
Pull the 3 top seals out of the valve cover as well, the ones that the bolts went through. The ones on Bryn’s car were hard and brittle and actually broke into pieces.
Use some paper towels to wipe out the inside of the valve cover while you have it off. Get rid of built up grime and don’t leave any debris in the.
Also clean out the valve grove very well to remove any junk, oil and goop. Make sure to do a really good job.
Insert the new valve cover seal into valve cover and press it into the groove with your fingers.
Clean the top of the head where the seal rests against, use a solvent if you have to. Be careful the machined edges are sharp.
Set the valve cover back down on top of the head carefully aligning it over the 3 studs which poke through the top.
Set the three new seals on top of the valve cover over the threaded rod and push them down gently.
Re-install the 3 cap nuts by hand until you can’t turn them any further, then use a wrench to tighten each one down a bit at time until they stop turning. Because these are cap nuts they can only screw down so far and if you force it you’re likely to break off the mounting stud.
Place the throttle cable and vacuum lines back in their clips and reconnect the breath line, replace the clamp.
Reattach the bracket between the valve cover and the air cleaner box and fasten it securely.
Run the engine and check for oil leaks, take it for a test drive and look again for oil leaks. Make sure to check it in a few more days as well.

That project went great, no more oil leaking on the engine and no more smoke pouring out of the engine compartment. I think Bryn was surprised at how easy it was to do and how much money he saved by not paying a shop to do the work.

Front Brakes
We picked up front pads and rear shoes for Bryn’s accord on Saturday and also a tie rod end for the passenger side (right side) as well since the one there was in rough shape. The total for the parts came in well under $100.

The front brakes weren’t too difficult to do though at all though we did discover the reason why the fuel mileage in Bryn’s car had been getting worse and worse over time and lacked power. One of the brake calipers was nearly seized. It was almost impossible to compress the piston back into the housing with a C-Clamp so that it’d fit around the new brake pads. In comparison the other piston was easy to press back into the housing with the clamp and caused no trouble. We are going to replace the calipers in a couple of weeks once his budget allows, but since we forced the bad piston back into the housing the Accord seems to have more power, though I am worried about the brakes wearing heavily on one side. Also the boots on both pistons are torn. New calipers are about $50 a piece.

I showed Bryn how to do this on the drivers side first, and then he did a majority of the work on the passenger side.

The pad replacement is straight forward though slightly different from some other vehicles I was used to. Here’s what we did.

Loosened the wheel lug nuts slightly
Jacked the car up and removed the lug nuts the rest of the way and removed the wheel
Removed the lower slider pin from the brake caliper, the upper slide pin head is round and cannot be removed with a socket wrench. It instead acts as a pivot point for the caliper.
Removed the two bolts in the bracket which holds the caliper brake line. The caliper may have overstretched and damaged the hose if this bracket was not freed.
Placed a C clamp around the caliper with the fixed end behind the caliper and the threaded end against the outer brake pad through the provided cutout in the caliper.
Compressed the break piston by tightening the C-clamp as much as possible. The piston should be nearly flush with the caliper housing, but it’s hard to see that with the pads in place.
Once we compressed the piston the caliper easily pulled up and away from the caliper bracket, leaving the brake pads sitting in the bracket. We used a piece of wire to tie the caliper up and out of the way.
Removed the old break pads by sliding them sideways out of the slots and marveled at how little brake material was actually left.
We had to compress the brake pistons a little more, we did this by placing a block of wood against the piston and again used the C-clamp to compress the piston more.
Installed the new brake pads and their included shims. The shims had a tendency to want to fall off so we bent the tabs slightly to hold them tight and used anti-squeak on them as well.
Rotated the caliper back down over the new brake pads and made sure everything fit well.
Replaced the two 10mm screws to secure the bracket that holds the caliper brake line.
Greased and replaced the slider bolt on the bottom end of the caliper and torqued it down.
Replace the wheel, snug the lug nets
Lowered the vehicle and tightened the lug nuts then Bryn went for a test drive.

He said the brakes were GREAT and he also noticed that the car seemed to have more power and accelerate more easily. This leads me to believe the seized brake piston was causing vehicle problems and may be what has been affecting his fuel milage, as mentioned above.

Rear Brakes
We ran out of daylight on Saturday to work on Bryn’s accord, all we had left to do for this weekend were the rear brakes so we decided to do them next weekend.