Horrible weekend

[aoriii]

I took the opportunity this last weekend to change out the valve cover gaskets on my 85 coupe. This promised to be a learning experience and also resolve a persistent oil leak and do away with the light smoking under the hood (oil dripping on exhaust manifold). After the fiasco that was my removal and instalation nightmare ( stripped holes in aluminum heads...I'll save the details for those who are really interested) I took it for test drive and had 2 REALLY bad occurances

I ran the car up to about 80 (while monitoring oil pressure - ran between 40 to 65 PSI), but when I dropped down on the brakes the oil pressure DROPPED!!:nono It went down to 5 PSI and the warning light came on. I remembered the ancient wisdom of an uncle mechanic "you must have oil to have oil pressure"...so my first instinct was that I was blowing oil somewhere . I was in mid motion to knock her into neutral and hit the ignition, when (to my suprise:confused ) the oil pressure came back up to normal, and stayed. I tried to re-create the problem and everytime I came to a stop, the oil pressure dropped to below 10PSI, and then recovered.


Issue #2: While accelerating and braking (testing my oil pressure problem), I got into the brakes pretty hard, and every time, I smelled something (like break fluid burning), and on the last time, I had plumes of dark smoke pouring from the front driver side wheel (stank horrible bad). Before leaving I had checked the brake resev. and the rear cup was nearly empty, but the front cup was over-full ( it spilled out when I removed the top like it was pressurized).

I have since parked the vette until I can get some resolution on the problems.

Does anyone have any thoughts on why my weekend went soooooo wrong???


Thanks for any input:cry

 

[Dave C. '04 Z06]

Well, did you check to see if you had enough oil?

If you don't , when you stop the oil will slosh towards the front of the motor and away from the pickup tube.

Your brakes? I don't know. Was it pulling to that side? If not and the brakes felt good, maybe some oil spashed on it or something. Unless you were really beating on the brakes hard and they somehow overheated. You don't really want to come to a complete stop from 80 really hard too many times, because the car has to be moving for the brakes to cool.

good luck,

-Dave