96-05 Chevy/GMC Astro/Safari 4.3L Driver's side bank cylinder head removal for new head gasket

Just to clarify, the cylinder heads are held in with 7 head studs inside of the cylinder head and 6 studs on the outside making it 13 studs that are torque-to-yield style bolts meaning they are one-time use because they stretch upon being torqued to the correct specification. So make sure you get a new set of head stud bolts if you are doing this yourself. Also didn't realize at the time that the harmonic balancer has 2 timing marks on it and to set TDC #1 Cylinder for distributor install it will throw you off. Makes sense why the distributor rotor cap was pointing at cylinder #6 initially. If you can try to learn from my mistakes and stumbling blocks so you don't have to. These videos help me learn as well. Thanks for watching and reading my note.

Added 17 Jul 2026