I have been getting the P0171 code on my wife's 2000 Protege for a couple of months. I thought for sure it was the MAF sensor so I changed it. No fix. I sprayed some F/I cleaner around the intake and found that the top center is leaking pretty badly. I bandaide fixed it with some RTV until I have time to replace the manifold gasket.

I need to also go ahead and replace the timing belt. The car has about 95k miles on it.

Are there any "gotcha's" with either of these jobs? The intake looks pretty straight forward is there anything that I need to worry about? Same with the timing belt.

Thanks for your help!

 

with the timing belt there really nothing to it just take off yourAssessorie belt take off the cover to the timing belt, But just make sure that when doing the timeing belt you take off the valve cover and re-align the cam shafts that absolutley has to be done, and while you have that off you might as well throw in some new gaskets i just did all mine about a week ago on my focus.

 

Thanks for the tip Darkstar!!!

Have you replaced the intake gasket? It looks fairly straight forward. The fuel rail needs to come off. I think I need to take the air cover off of the intake to get to some of the bolts easier. Other than that I can't see anything weird.

 

which intake gasket the one underneth the throttle body? cause that one you should just have to take the intake tube off take the throttle body off and it would be right there or is there another one that your changing?

 

The gasket for the intake that bolts to the block.

 

Bump...

 

How do you know there is an intake leak? Smoke test?

o171 is "lean condition" code? If so, iave you checked 02 sensor that informs fuel trims (not the converter monitor one) You may have a bad signal.

And use only "sensor safe" silly-cone or you will be replacing 02 sensors

 

Oh....duh.

just get the correct RTV

 

I used high temp sealant. but it's not really made for something like this. Eventually vibration pulls it away from the surface you are trying to seal. No biggie. the gasket is all of $4 at autozone. I just wanted to see if there was any problems encountered in trying to replace it. I need to replace the O2 sensors as well at some point. It's coming up on 100k miles. I'll probably just do it all in a weekend. Timing belt, intake gasket and O2 sensors.