i am replacing my exhaust manifold gasket, with a remflex carbon gasket and am in the middle of removing the exhaust studs and am having a hard time getting my gorilla mitts and a 14mm wrench in there to remove the lower front and rear studs.

i removed the other six with ease by putting 2 nuts on the stud and wrenching on the inner nut to pull the stud out, but now with the lack of room i'm scratching my head.

i dont really want to remove much from the engine bay and im hoping to get some advice from anyone that will point out the obvious im not seeing! i know its not that hard!

tomorrow i try again, and i think i will remove the pipe from manifold to cat and unbolt it from the bellhousing so i can at least get the manifold off the head, then maybe i will have enough room to keep doing what im doing....

i have the 2 studs soaking in PB blaster, so hopefully it will move without snapping. last thing i want to do is tap and helicoil. ive heard these two are the most stubborn...

any help?????????
note: i know i should take the manifold to a machine shop, but dont want the downtime and im upgrading to header soon anyway, this is just to get rid of the flapping/slapping noise coming from the black stain in the rear of the manifold, at least, temporarily.

 

When i removed my stock exhaust manifold to put my header on, i didn`t have any problems getting things a part. Whats in the way that blocking you from getting it off ?.

 

i got it off, it seemed like everything was in the way, lol. i ended up taking the down pipe out form manifold to cat and was able to completely remove manifold. then i easily got to the stubborn studs. no prob. studs came out fine and i probably could have reused but had new ones so i put em in anyway.

i def recommend REMFLEX gaskets, high quality product made in USA. check em out...

http://www.remflex.com/

got everything back together and there was a lil smoke from all of the pb blaster sprayed all over lol, but quickly went away to show a great seal. NO NOISE ANYMORE!!!! so relieved i was going nuts before thinking of how much money i needed to spend on a valve adj/replacement so glad it was a 30 dollar gasket!

 

Seems like everything can get in the way sometimes. Not much room under my '85 hood!