20 replies to this topic

[GraemeC]

As an addition - if you are getting regular head gasket failures get your torque wrench checked.

If it is way out of calibration you could quite easily under/over torque the head nuts everytime and never know. No amount of skimming will overcome wrongly torqued nuts!

[Mr Joshua]

Jut to add after the fact. Warping a cast iron head is easily done. I bet if any of you were to take your never skimmed heads down to the engineeres they would remove atleast .001" to achieve a flat surface. On a straight 6 cylindwer head you can clamp down and seal a 0.003 bow in the head on a four cylinder head you would require a skim.

[eden7842]

thanks for that very informative,

as far a comp testing what should i be looking for, it metro 1275 lump, and wats the best method of performing the test?

[eden7842]

bump?

[Spenner]

However, as a warning to you and others, if your car ever starts to misfire badly and you suspect head gasket problems, especially between
cylinders, do NOT continue to drive the car with it running this way. I have seen several heads and blocks where the METAL surfaces of the head
and block were BURNED AWAY. I know this sounds crazy, but I have seen it on several different engines. In each case, a small "ditch" was formed
and the metal was burned down to a depth of approx. 1/16 of an inch. This takes a serious skim to clean it up and if either the block or head
is already severely skimmed, it may not be an option to do a skim of the required depth to restore the usefulness of these parts.



Best to be safe rather than sorry. Pull over and get your car towed to a place where you can work on it.

I have seen this too it happened to one of my MG metro's back in the early ninties.

When my head gasket went last week for the second time in a very short time the first thing i checked was that the block wasnt damaged. Luckly it wasnt although when i removed the gasket the burn marks that were left made it look as if it did i was abot to cry lol

Edited by Spenner, 23 July 2009 - 09:00 PM.

[Mr Joshua]

thanks for that very informative,

as far a comp testing what should i be looking for, it metro 1275 lump, and wats the best method of performing the test?

Anything from 10-13:1 I use a gunsonns tester just for a comparrison to ensure all cylinders are the same.

Edited by Mr Joshua, 24 July 2009 - 09:26 AM.