Been slowly getting an EA82T back together. Last weekend I was putting the passenger (non-distributor) side cam and everything back on. While putting on the 4 bolts for the valve cover I stripped a couple of them. The strange part is, I couldn't even tell I was stripping them till it was to late as the bolts never even got hand tight. So either I don't know my own stregth, or the threads had already been damaged when the previous owner had rebuilt the engine.
So, tore everything apart and helicoil'ed all the valve cover threads, and the threads on the cam retainer (they were stripping too). I then decided to be on the safe side, I went to helicoil the same offending threads on the other side of the engine (distributor side), only to find that some one else had already done it.
I then remembered that the passenger side was the one that always had the "Subaru valve cover leak", but the driver side never had a problem.
Correlation doesn't always imply causation, so I was wondering if anyone else on the board had noticed if helicoil'ed valve cover bolts helped provide a better valve cover seal?