Edsel Villager Gets Gaskets

Update by Tim Suddard to the Edsel Villager project car
Dec 21, 2011

The exhaust gaskets have been troublesome since we picked the Edsel up, but we think we've found the fix.

The RemFlex gasket is obviously thicker than a traditional exhaust manifold gasket.

Compared with a stock paper-style gasket, the Remflex piece looks like a great solution.

We had already been through three sets of lesser OEM style gaskets on the 390 FE engine in our project Edsel wagon, and still had an annoying exhaust leak.

While at the PRI show recently we walked past a booth advertising Remflex exhaust gaskets. These gaskets promised a 50% crush area that would seal warped and pitted exhaust manifold flanges, heat tolerance to 3000 degrees and no re-torquing required.

We had already been through three sets of lesser OEM-style gaskets on the 390 FE engine in our project Edsel wagon, and still had an annoying exhaust leak. We were willing to try anything.

Though the roughly $30 they cost is a little steep for gaskets, it’s damned cheap to solve this annoying problem. Just looking at the gaskets it becomes clear why they work. They are physically both wider and thicker than stock gaskets. They just look like they would seal better than a stock piece. You can take a pair of pliers and see how much crush area there is.

As it turns out, the engine in our Edsel is from a 1966 Mercury and uses a slightly different gasket than the ones we received. We didn’t specify the year and the cutoff is 1965. rather than return them, we modified them slightly and installed them.

The installation was straightforward and when we started the car, we were thrilled to have our annoying exhaust leak disappear. Could it really be this simple? We will report back in a few months to see if the gaskets did in fact need to be re-torqued and how they held up, but so far we are thrilled and can recommend Remflex gaskets. We know we’ll be using them again.