Root of all Evil

I have a bensen sleeved, laskey built b18c5 83mm which makes 330whp on low boost. It's got a cometic headgasket on it. Driving the car on the street with the occasional hard pull does not seem to fill the overflow at all. When I track the car it fills it. I thought it was because of my inferior rad and cooling setup. I thought the coolant was boiling so I replaced the stock itr rad with a full size 3 row mishimoto with 19lb cap and now running straight water with mocool additive. I can see black specks in the water so it must be leaking combustion into the coolant. Something else that is weird is that at 15psi or about 380whp the tank fills slower than when I run low boost 10psi? That doesn't make sense to me. Could the extra heat actually seal the leak?

IS there any point in doing a leakdown? What kind of gasket should I replace the cometic with? Are the ge ones machined well? Also my arp headstuds have been torqued 3 times on different builds, is it time to replace them and could that have been part of the problem?
I really don't feel like working on this car anymore this year, I have spent thousands and worked countless hours and have been to one track day lol.

Any thoughts are appreciated!

joe111599

I know how ya feel man. Working on the car several times can be very upsetting. Been there with mine.

A few years ago I was having issues with the cometic headgasket so I switched back to an OEM gasket(GE is OEM) and it worked excellent. It sounds like your head gasket has blown and/or the head is lifting.

Hopefully you get it fixed soon so you can enjoy your car. Sucks working on them all the time!

Root of all Evil

What sort of issues did u have with the cometic? Same thing as me?

civickiller

cometic sucks, oem ftw

racebum

like others have said, you have combustion gasses leaking, that's also raising your coolant temps. tear the head off and start over, make sure the deck and head are true and use an oem gasket

Root of all Evil

Took the motor apart and I was surprised that everything looked great. I don't see any evidence of the gasket being blown, I thought it would look burned up in one or two spots. I checked the block and head and the head is being resurfaced and I bought a golden eagle 83mm gasket and I replaced the arp's with ge's headstud kit. Last time I installed the cometic without copper spray, but this time I was advised to spray the oem gasket so I hope all is well.

One thing I noticed was how smoothly the ge headstuds thread into the block by comparison to the arp's. Not sure what to make of that but I thought it was strange.

SpeedwayCoating

Yeah I like the ge head studs better than the ARPs. Let us know what it does now.