could you guys tell me what they looked like? did you use just the o-ring? or did it have somehting that went around the bottom of the stem? I picked up a set of intake and a set of exhaust stem seal kits and they were two different types. The intake are VITON (rubber like) and the exhaust are hard nylon

here are a couple of pics of the pieces that go around the bottom of the stem

intake:




exhaust:




I want to do these tomorrow so if you could let me know asap I would appreciate it

 

Our cars have 2 types of valve seals that go on them O'ring and Umbrella type "the seal that don't have the bands" but there is one other type of valve seal and that is Positive type thats whats in your pic at the top........Those are good vavle seals they go around the boss of the head and they stay in place on the boss.........Umbrella goes over the boss but they move up and down with the valve........O' ring's go around the top of the valve in the grove.............If you have never changed your seals befor the all you probably saw is the O'ring. It come with Umbrella seals but after so long the get hard and break and go into the bottom of your oil pan......Hope I helped

 

thanks man
I did valve seals before but I only did the o-ring type. I was about half way through when someone told me that there are other kinds that I should have used. This was when the motor was out and I just wanted to get the car running again because I didn't think it would make that much of a difference, but it did of course.

so what I have is the good kind correct?

 

Yes, you should be fine with thoes.............good luck on putting them on...

 

The top (blue ones) are the kind I used, To put them on I just stuffed some rope in the cylinder and pushed them on with a small deep socket like (11mm) , no more smoke at start up. It's been about 1500 miles on them so far.

 

When i did the ones on my 350, I used umbella and o-ring seals on all the valves. It seems to work well, no smoke on start up anymore. When I did my friends (UkraineTrain) heads just yesterday, I used the positive locking seals on the intake and umbrella on the exhaust, along with o-rings on all of them.

Oh, and on my engine when I did them the old seals were umbrella and o-ring on all the valves, and probably half of the umbrella seals were either missing totally or cracked, and that was on heads that were cast in 97, so they couldnt be more then like 5 years old.