The V8 Owners Forum -

What the ARP studs are not available?

The 3.9 bolts will probably be stretch bolts, you can use these if you torque them up the correct way. Believe this or not but you are much better off not fitting the outer row of head bolts anyway, they place an uneven load on the heads which is one of the reasons that the head gaskets can blow into the valley area of the engine. Rover stopped using the bolts on later engines for this reason. They changed from the tin head gaskets to composite one also to help seal the heads to the block. You can get these for the 3.5 engine but if you want to keep the same compression ratio you will need to skim around 0.5mm off the heads.

ok cool so i can use the 3.9 bolts and leave the 4 bolts out - what torques setting will i need for the 3.9 bolts please

Aminv8 wrote:ok cool so i can use the 3.9 bolts and leave the 4 bolts out - what torques setting will i need for the 3.9 bolts please

I've never used the stretch bolts but the fact that you mentioned the torque setting suggests that you haven't used them either! Someone will hopefully be able to help you or failing that use Google. It will be something like torquing them to a very low figure then turning them another 90 degrees after that. You need to use decent stretch bolts, someone on this forum tested a load that he got off ebay and they were useless!

Bored at work so I have found this youtube clip, from around 28 minutes into the clip the bloke is refitting the heads, it looks like its a low torque figure on all the bolts then two 90 degree sweeps of the wrench after that.
The only issues that you might have is that if you stick with the tin head gaskets then this procedure might not be totally correct as they will not compress the same amount as composite head gaskets. Personally I'd go for the later head gaskets and a head skim........

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwdg1XCsI_w