Colt Hero

'02 Impala 3.4L Base 105K: Removing Injectors from Fuel Rail

How do you remove the injectors from the fuel rail on this car? I (unfortunately) removed the fuel rail as part of the LIM gasket replacement, and now on re-install I'm going ahead and replacing the O-Rings like the Helm manual says I should. Today I was really tempted to just slip on the lower O-Rings and forget about the uppers, but I had tugged on one injector so much that I was afraid I might have distorted the seal, which obviously is not good.

Also, and this might be an illusion, but while pulling on the one injector, the seal trying to come out didn't look like an O-Ring to me. It looked more like a wider, flatter, cylindrical sleeve (like a heating pad wrapped around your arm). The kit has 16 O-rings in it (all black in color), 8 thinner and 8 thicker. It looks like the thinner ones match up with the lowers I pulled off near the injector head. The thicker ones must go at the top, but like I said, it didn't look like an O-Ring that was trying to come out.

One last thing that you can weigh in on: the injector heads were full of black gunk (or even carbon), so I carefully scraped them around the perimeter with an awl and then cleaned them off with throttle body cleaner. It looks like each injector has two tiny spray holes in the center - and I could see them on each one, but I felt the need to get the crud off each of them. Was this a bad idea?