How to Replace Exhaust Manifold Gasket 2007-10 Hyundai Elantra

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm going to be working on a 2007 Hyundai Elantra, and I'm going to show you how to do a manifold gasket. It's going to be a very easy job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. So if you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

So now it's time to get this out of the way. That's just an air inlet. Okay. It goes down to your air filter box. We've got a 10 millimeter here and there should be a 10 millimeter there, so if you have two, remove two, you have one, remove one. Either way, remove the anchoring bolts with a 10 millimeter. Once you have that out, we'll go ahead and remove the air duct. That's what this one looks like. Just going to pull it right off. Let's get this out of the way. Just going to pull it off of here. There we are. Try to work that out of there and that out of there. Cool. We'll set this right aside. Can move along here. We've got electrical connectors. We take off the bottom side. Just going to put this in here. Give this a little wiggle. We'll take a peek. As you can tell, there's no funny colors. You always want to check your electrical connectors.

We'll put this aside. This wire right here, it goes right to the motor so we don't have to worry about taking any of this apart. Awesome. Get this off of here. We can take that off. See if I can get my socket on. Here we are. Put that right there and set it aside where we can find it again, of course. Perfect. So we're looking pretty good here on the radiator itself. It has a little piton, you just kind of pull it away and then you can lift up on the fan shroud. Just like that. I'm going to do the same thing on this side. Just a little piton. Pull it away, lift up, and I'm going to take this. Let's see if I can work it up.

Okay, so we'll just keep on trying. There's a couple of things to think about here. Over on this side, it's kind of hitting on the upper hose area of the radiator. So if you find it to be too much of an issue and you don't want to deal with it, what you could do is grab a coolant receptacle, put it underneath the bottom there. You can drain some coolant out with your petcock at the bottom there on the passenger side of the radiator. Once you drain the coolant down low enough, you don't have to drain it all completely out, but you want it to be at least low enough so it's not all up here, you can just go ahead and squeeze this clamp. Pull it away, and then get your hose off. You might have plenty of room at that point. I'm going to keep trying a little bit here without actually taking it off just because I don't want to have to drain the coolant out to do this job.

There we are. We've removed our fan shroud. So we want to have a clear view of what we're doing here at this point, right? We're going to remove the four 10 millimeter head bolts. One, two, three, four. This particular vehicle only has two, so I'm going to do two. You do how many however many bolts you've got. Who knows? Maybe you don't even have this cover on there. One, set it aside. Come over to my other one. Two. Grab our cover, we'll set this aside. I've got my pocket screwdriver, small pry bar. You can use a screwdriver, whatever you need. I'm just going to take this, go in between here, push down and go right here. I'm just going to try to disconnect this O2 sensor. That's my plan. See if I can get it to disconnect.

It feels like a no. I'm just going to put a little bit of penetrant, see if I can help this thing along. Penetrant's going to hopefully do its job. If it doesn't seem like it wants to separate, it's giving you too much of a hassle like this one is. I don't want to go ahead and break this. Okay? Because then I'm buying myself a fairly expensive O2 sensor. You can risk it. I'm just going to go ahead and cover this back up. Get it sitting back where it like to be, make sure it's clipped all the way in. Not that it came out, but anyway, going to take this, pull the wire. I'm going to have a rag ready.

Next, what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove these two bolts. There's two more down here. These ones are rotted out, but the two that are holding this shield, I'm going to remove those. Then I'm going to take my shield, I'm going to bring it down. I'm going to wrap this wire with a rag so I can't get cut by this metal, and then I'm just going to have it hang out down there and wait for me to do the job that I need to do here. Okay? So here we go. I have a rag ready. Take out these bolts. Get the shield hanging down.

If your bolts are in poor condition, these were supposed to be 12s right here by the way, if they're in poor condition and your 12 doesn't want to grip on, you could use something like this. Just a twisty socket. It's kind of like a rifled barrel, right? You put it on, give it a couple bonks. Just like that. It goes on and twists. Now I can take my ratchet, or even better, if you had an air gun, you could use that. Turn it to the left, remove our bolt and do the same thing for here. And if those other two right there were attached like they should be, I would do those as well, more than likely. Bolt number two looks just like bolt number one. I'm just going to go ahead and take this out of the socket real quick and we'll set it aside.

I've got my rag, that's going to take it. I'll wrap it around this wire so it's small enough to fit it through that hole right there. Going to be very careful not to damage this O2 sensor. Okay? Super important. It's a delicate piece of electronics. See if I can get this down and bring the rag with it. Try to get it down and out of my way here is my plan. Come on, then. Okay. That's low enough. I'm not putting too much pressure on this wire. Now I'm going to grab some penetrant and I'm going to spray all these studs where the nuts go on. Okay? We'll let the penetrant do its job.

So here's where our noise is coming from. I can practically stick my whole screwdriver down inside there in between the engine and this manifold. Okay? So what we're going to do is we're just going to take this off, right? We're going to spray down these nuts, the studs, and we'll get this off. We can check to make sure that the manifold itself is not cracked. Alright, maybe I'll do that now as well. I'll grab a mirror, I'll take a peek underneath. Take a peek along the top, all around. Sometimes you get a crack. This one I don't think has that issue. I believe that the only issue that was making the noise in the first place was right along here.

I've got all these ... Okay. I'm going to be a little preemptive here and I'm going to take a look at what's going to happen. As I go to try to remove all these bolts, these are going to be fairly easy to get to coming along the line here, right? This center one right here, that one's going to be a little bit more difficult because we're going to have to come through this hole, which is fine. I'm glad they put that hole there for me. Problem is we have our O2 sensor here. The O2 sensor is going to be in the way to get our ratchet and you know, everything that we're going to try to use to get those nuts out. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to try and take this O2 sensor out.

I'm going to apply a fair amount of heat down along the manifold itself. Okay, right along the bung on the manifold where the O2 sensor screws in and then I'm just going to go ahead and try to turn this out using my O2 sensor socket and extension and a ratchet. Safety glasses on, hand protection of course. I'm just going to keep this moving. As you run over rust, of course it's going to shoot out a little sparkage. So you want to watch out for that. Don't want to set my beard on fire. Not today. Okay, let's give that a try. We don't need to go too hot. Okay, that broke free. Wonderful.

Now I want to make sure that I have plenty of slack. Okay? So normally what I would want to do is I would want to take off this part. You know, the wiring, so that way there, I don't have to worry about twisting these wires. But there really isn't anything I can do about that because I don't want to break this down here. So I'm just going to try to make sure that I got plenty of slack to give this some twists. Okay? I don't want to go ahead and mess up any of my wires, so I'm going to be careful for that. Tool off of there, bring it around, if we can get it on. It's like watching paint dry, doing it this way without disconnecting it, I know. I'm sorry about that, but what can I do?

O2 sensor might be a little warm, so be careful. This one's not too bad. There's our O2 sensor. Let's take a peek at it. Make sure the threads don't look like they're messed up. Those look good. We'll go ahead and set this aside. What I'm going to actually do now, since I have the ability, I'm going to go ahead and get this shield out of here. Careful with my sensor, of course. Draw it through the hole. There's my shield. I'll put my sensor out of the way. We'll set this aside.

So now that we've got that all out of the way, we'll just take a peek at the threads in the manifold where our O2 sensor threaded into. A lot of times these might strip out. Those actually look really good. I would say we got fairly lucky. If you found that those were stripped, you could go ahead and try to tap them out with a tap set if you wanted to, try to fix them up. Sometimes people sometimes have to drill them out and heli-coil them and other times people will just replace the manifold. You know, whatever you got to do. You do you, booboo. If you look down in here though, right down in that hole, I'm not sure if we can see. Down inside there, you'll see a honeycomb. This is the inside of your catalytic converter. If you see there isn't any honeycomb in there, well, your catalytic converter's no good. Or maybe it's busted up. At that point, you would want to replace this. Okay, this one looks really good, so I'm not going to worry about it. Let's keep on moving ahead and we'll get busy taking off these nuts.

So now it's going to be to take off these nuts, right? There's a couple options of what you could do. Generally speaking, I like to heat them up first. Okay? That's going to help loosen them up, get it so they're going to want to free up and come right off easily. You could do something like maybe one of these, if you've got all day. Something like that if you've got a few minutes, or something like this, if you want to get the job done. Okay? So I'm going to get my socket ready. I'm going to be using a 14 millimeter, an extension, and of course my ratchet. I'm going to keep it all separated for now in case I have the hammer on the extension with my socket. That ready to go. We know we don't have any fuel lines open or anything like that.

Get this ready to go. Just going to try to heat directly on the nut there. Get it so it's nice and warm. Nice and warm and cozy. There we are. Our socket with our extension. Oh, slid right on. Love it. See if we can turn it to the left here. Oh yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Ooh, hot! It's always a great idea to have new nuts when you're replacing this or doing this job. They are locking nuts. There we are, super hot. Put it back on there. I'm going to put it in my little puddle of water, cool it down, and we're going to do the rest of the nuts.

Okay. Time to do the rest of the bolts. Put on our safety glasses again. Get our tools. (silence) Not too hot. Pull that away from the engine. There we are. All right. Make sure that doesn't tug down on our O2 sensor wire there. Careful for these studs, they may still be hot. Get our gasket out of the way. As you can tell, this is where the leak was. Black soot, boom.

Okay, so now it's time to get this cleaned up. There's multiple ways that you can do this. What you could do is if you had new studs, which is generally speaking a good idea, you'd want to replace these studs. You could take all these out and use a nice sanding block with some sand paper. Get it all nice and clean. Right? You want to clean that up. You can go with something like this with a wire brush or another wire brush. Can maybe use a scraper of some sort and try to scrape it down if you've got any big chunks of stuff, right? You want to make sure nothing gets inside your catalytic converter/manifold there, or especially into the port of your engine. Okay? So while you're cleaning, pay special attention, make sure nothing's really getting inside there, but essentially you just want to make sure that this is all nice and clean where your seal's going to ride or your gasket's going to ride in between your engine and your manifold. So you clean this side and then of course you'd clean your manifold side. Sandpaper, wire brush, wire wheel, whatever you need to do, just get it done. Needs to be super clean, smooth surfaces.

Just put a little rag here, try to keep the majority of these ports closed up so nothing can get down into my catalytic converter area. We're just going to take a little screwdriver, try to get out as much of this crud as possible. That way there, when I'm doing my cleaning, I'm not brushing it to the sides and possibly shooting it into my ports there. Okay. Wow, nasty. There we are. So we'll just make sure this is cleaned up. Once it looks like it's pretty good, and this does look pretty good at this point, I'm going to grab my brush or sandpaper or however you're cleaning this. By the way, these brushes are available at 1AAuto.com. I'm just going to take it, make it look nice and pretty. The prettier, the better on this, okay?

So we've got it cleaned up the best we could. We did what we had to do. Now I'm just going to take a little blow gun. These are available at 1AAuto.com. I'm just going to try to clean it up around here. Get inside my ports, make sure just in case any dust made its way in, I'm getting it right out of there. Okay, let's get the manifold here. So here we go. We've got our new gasket, we'll just match it up with the old one. Make sure we're dealing with the same part here. It looks pretty great. We'll recycle that. I got brand new nuts. We cleaned up all around the engine. We blew it out the best we could. We're just going to slide this over our studs, just like that. Now it's ready and waiting.

What's next? Grab the manifold. We'll bring it up, we'll slide it on here and then we'll get some nuts on. There we are. Perfect. 14 millimeter. All we're going to do is just start them on at this point and then we'll bottom them out. There are sequence for this, so don't get too carried away. So now we're going to go ahead and bottom all these out. I started them all on, I'm going to start from the center. Okay, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. Work my way out. Basically start from the center and work your way up, that way they're, as you're going, the gasket is going to keep seating, seating, seating, working its way out. If you go here and then over here, what if you tighten both these down and it puts a little bend in this, right? And it's got a whole bunch of extra slack in the middle? What's going to happen when you start to tighten these up? It's going to just kind of pinch it, put a little pinch, and it's not going to tighten down right.

So start from the center, do Crisscross, work your way out. Okay? So I'm going to bottom out from the center. I'm not going to tighten it down very tight. The torque specification for this is between 32 and 40 foot pounds, so that's not very much. I started with the center. Then go here or there, you pick. We'll go left twix, why not? (silence) So here we go. Let's get this torque down. We're going to go in the same sequence as we did before. We're starting from the center and we're going to work our way out. Okay? From the center. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Work your way out. 14 millimeter. We're going to torque it down. The Spec for this is between 32 and 40 foot pounds. So I'm going to go ahead and go 38 because that's pretty close to the middle there. It feels like it's a safe bet. Little under the maximum there and above the minimum.

We've got our shield. Let's get this over this. Bolt holes. We'll grab our bolts. We're going to secure this shield so hopefully it doesn't rattle too much when we're driving. I mean, it's missing the other two down there. Not going to worry too much about that. Some things in life you just can't change. Feels good. Obviously I don't want to break these off. There we are. Feels decent. We know we're going to be turning it the right quite a few times to be able to tighten it up, so I'm just going to bring it a couple of times to the left here. Now, that way, hopefully by the time I get this tightened up, it shouldn't have too many twists in it. That's my plan. Just going to see if I can get it started. A couple of twists in it. It's really not too, too bad. I would say it's doable. Let's tighten it up. Just going to go ahead and snug this. That feels decent. We don't need to go too tight with it. All we need to do is make sure that it's tight, it won't vibrate loose. We'll get our tool out of the way. Bring this up, get it back in here, spin that over. That looks pretty great. Let's move along.

Let's go ahead and get this fan shroud back in, shall we? Want to put it in this way? No, we're going to put it in this way, right? We've got our electrical connector over here. I'm going to try to keep it fairly straight. Going to be careful for my O2 sensor and of course my radiator fins. Just going to see if I can get it past all this. There we go. Okay. Let's see what's holding this up. There it is. Just keep wiggling it. There we go. Okay.

On the back side of the radiator, the engine side, there's little hooks like this along the bottom, and then there's hooks along the top as well. The top ones lock in, so we want to make sure we have it settled into the bottom ones. Of course, those are the harder ones to see. Then make sure they're lined up with the top ones as well, which it looks like it is. I'm going to give it a little bonk. Bonk, bonk, bonk. There we go. It's my thing. We got our little clippy do that we took off. Push that in there. We've got our electrical connector with our lock that's facing towards the engine. Give it a little squeeze. Listen for a click, double click, bonk. There we are. Just want to make sure that this is fully locked in. Okay? Right here. You've got this, just going to go right like this and into there. We're going to tighten this down with a 10 millimeter. There we go. Feels good. Nice. Purpose of this is to keep the upper hose from going near the fan. Okay? And/or, you know, the heat of the exhaust.

So it looks like we're cruising right along. I've got this right here. I'm just going to kind of set where we know it's going to need to go and just clip it in. It's fairly easy. It's going to go right on here. This is the overflow hose. As your engine coolant gets warm, fluid expands, so when this is full, it's going to expand. It has to go somewhere. The radiator cap's going to do its job. A little plunger is going to go up. It's going to let coolant come through here and then fill up your overflow.

We've got our air intake. I'm going to start it into the air filter housing first. I'm going to set it down onto this right here, and I'm going to bring it down right to there. I'm going to put this bolt back in. Get it lined up. Should be two, there's only one. Broken bolts. Feels pretty great. All right, let's get to filling her up.

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