wildoutwhitegsr

So I pulled my head yesterday just to do a check up and see what condition my valves and pistons are in and everything seems to be fine. But I have what I believe to be excess fuel on the top of cylinder three and a improperly cut valve seat on cylinder three. Help me confirm my findings.





Cylinder 1



Cylinder 2



Cylinder 3, see what I mean on the exhaust side.









Cylinder 4



Block Side







Cylinder 1



Cylinder 2



Cylinder 3 *Notice the unburnt fuel that I had wiped partially away from the top of the piston.*



Cylinder 4




Then lastly, is this leak from my cam seal or the corner of my headgasket. New golden eagle cam seal & new oem honda headgasket. Cam seal had no hondabond on it and the headgasket had no copper spray.








Thanks in advance to all that answer.

IntegraType-R

for sure they look ok..
cyl4 is running lean
cyl 3 is running rich or possible oil control rings.. yoru valves reflect what your pistons do.. its in decent shape.

non-VTEC

looks like some oil consumption going on with the ammount of cabon build up on the valves and pistons. nothing to serious though.

that valve seat you see if just the edge of the seat insert that is pressed into the head. it just so happens that it's visiable and not coverd in carbon.

everything looks alright.....i would not worry to much about it.

Hybrid96EK

There is no reason to use copper spray on these headgaskets. I don't know why so many people find it a requirement...

I would also say you have some slight oil consumption issues from the oil control rings. I am assuming this setup is realatively new? How many miles on it? I have personally had these "issues" with new rebuilds where it takes 1,200 miles or so before the wet piston tops disappear and the oil consumption levels off. Don't know if it has to do with the control rings having little tension or not. Seems to take a while for them to seat though.

Its almost impossible for us to tell where that oil leak orginated from. I would suspect distributor o ring and cam seal first... then I would check the vtec solenoid gasket. 9 times out of 10, you will find your problem in those 3.

anothersickhatch

p.s. just to throw in there, your spark plugs look like your motor has been running lean.

it might be from the flash of the camera, but they shouldn't look white like that. could be the culprit to your pistons and valves looking the way they do.

98vtec

being that engine was likely in an idling condition before shutting down and tearing it apart, showing lean signs are fine.

wildoutwhitegsr

Thanks guys. I realized after that the part of the valve seat that showing is just clean and me being over tired just, over reacted. The carbon on the piston isn't bad at all. I actually wiped it off with paper towel and it came right off, which lead me to believe that is was unburnt fuel. I do have to adjust this one section of my tune that dips to 10.0 af ratio on decel for about 2 seconds. Just waiting for my new Neptune board to arrive.

98vtec is correct about the lean condition because the head was pulled after I let the car idle a bit while parking it in the garage. I idle at 15.0 af.

To tell you the truth I was more worried about getting another burnt exhaust valve, since that's what caused me to rebuild the motor in the first place. Also the wetness is just from the left over oil in the head dripping into the cylinders. I had to rest the head on the head studs while I disconnected the one coolant hose I forgot connected to the IACV still.


So far I added a little bit of hondabond to the corners of my head gasket just in case, where they indicated to do so in the helms and added a butt load all over the golden eagle cam seal since I've read they fail as well. Sometime this week I'm going to order a new vtec solenoid gasket. For now the leak has stopped, but only time will tell.

About 50,000kms of use on this motor. Broken in on the dyno and auto-x the very next week.

Will keep everyone updated on the oil consumption though. I never really burned any excepted when racing, but that's normal. Here's a link to my build 2.5 years ago https://honda-tech.com/zerothread?id=1607658




Modified by wildoutwhitegsr at 9:39 AM 10/16/2008