Mr Belvedere

hello boys. I'll start this thread by sharing some wisdom.

1) if it aint broke dont fix it
2) if everyone says dont mess with it, generally they are correct.
3) if you broke it while fixing it punch yourself in the *****.

these three lessons have been learned and I wont be doing things i shouldnt do from now on. however the real reason i made this thread is because my head gasket change has spawned a bunch of problems. here is a list of what I did

1) remove air boxes, radiator, fluid hoses, battery, power steering pump, fuel lines, fuel rail, valve cover, timing belt

2) removed head studs in 1/3 increments, following proper torque sequence, of course at TDC blah blah blah, cleaned the crap out of it in my home over the course of a week, cleaned TB, (did not touch IACV)

3) installed fellpro headgasket from Discount auto, torqued head up properly, threw the timing belt on, valve cover (reused gasket =/ ), put everything back in. reconnected the hoses to radiator etc. power steering pump back in. fuel rain back in, reused the seals again =/

4)*** this is where i think i introduce a lot of problems. Castrol GTX synthetic oil. Discount auto brand 'honda' p/s fluid. reused my old spark plugs(BOSCH platinum+4) . distilled H20 for coolant. still a lot of green rad fluid in there, so im not too worried about corrosion or specific heat transfer of h2o haha. and oh yeah, i think it was valvoline Auto tranny fluid; high mileage.

5) car turns on instantly. three days super easy driving proved it was stable. the next 5 days of beating on the engine further solidified my confidence in my back yard mechanic skills (or college campus skills whatever)


********* **** just got serious********

so i have my car full of passengers, so its heavier than usual.
i since was following my friend who has a damn cbr250rr, i decide to race him for ***** and giggles.
nothing serious happened besides i got wooped. we all pull into publix and i talk to cbr boy by his bike for a second, and when i come back to my car, i see she is overheating at 75% from parked idle

at a red light down the street she stalls out on me. i drive her back home under 2k rmp to be safe and barely make the 3min drive back to my complex. she missfired at low speeds pretty hard.

she was making nasty sounds and i just shut her off and went to sleep.. it was 2am already. she smelled like oil, which i assume is the synthetic leaking from the valve cover (after all i did race a bike -__-) no puddles under the car, i threw in the towel for the night.


****** the next day *****

fill up her radiator with a whole gallon of distilled h2o
i turn her on, she is fine. i drive to discount auto real easy, shes fine. get the CEL codes pulled and i have cylinder 2,3,4 misfiring and also multiple misfires. also after pouring water into the radiator i saw grey gunk on the cap and inner diameter of the... um orifice? for lack of a better term? New NGK Iridium spark plugs.. my old bosch ones had 5k miles on them and they sketch me out, ill post a pic or two of them. so i got new ones. incredibly enough, i felt like my d17 was firing better.

either way, driving back home, at red light i notice a rough idle. its idling really low, id say near 500 when it should be at 700. it had a consistent beat to it too, id say it was sputtering at a rhythm of 'sputter sputter clean clean clean clean sputter sputter clean clean clean clean'.... etc

since i have to drive to south florida this weekend, i took it for a test on the highway about 45 minutes later. i drove for about 20 mins really easy, nothing above 3k rpm, no accelerations, nothing abusive. I started noticing a bit of a shake on the steering wheel or felt it at the pedal. I stop at McDonalds and look at it idle in park with the hood open and wtf.. she is shaking. rough idle is in effect, and it looks like the rough idle is a misfire from all the shaking, but i cant tell and there is no CEL to come on ever since Discount auto parts.

*********** the productive part of the post**********

Im about to check the level of the radiator fluid as soon as she cools down. this will determine if the head gasket has been allowing coolant into the combustion chamber

the oil leaking from my valve cover gasket is to be expected. we all know i have to change that gasket and put some OEM sealant on there.

grey **** in the radiator cap is (according to google) oil that leaked into the coolant. >>> check head gasket >>> which makes me scared of having to be "that guy" that has to change his HG twice in a row.

my thoughts on the shaking/shuddering/awkward idle are.. none. i havent had time to google yet, im still at McDonald's. my expertise only tells me it was rough before the over heat, so it cant be the IACV, must check vacuum hoses.

show some love, hate, or encouragement or just plain flame me for being overly wordy. oh yeah, Betsy says hi (thats my cars name).

4tika4

why did you change it in the first place?

Mr Belvedere

changed it because i was loosing coolant, my spark plugs were yellowish/powdery, my O2 sensors were also with that coolant residue. when it overheated the first time was my first clue. also it had 129k miles on it so i took it as a hint to change it before things get worse i get a warped head.

chawski

did you bother machining the head after the HG swap. if not, the entire job could be for nothing. if youre getting to the point that youre overheating and narrowed it down to a HG, chances are the head has had some heat issues as well. Yea, you saved $100 by not machining the head, but if its warped, that $100 just turned into doing the job again.

EM2abe

Even if you cant tell if the head is warped or not, it should STILL be resurfaced so as to make sure the problem never persists again. It is in my experience that this step should not be overlooked, otherwise the problem will return.

Mr Belvedere

Update:

hey guys this post might sound confusing, but i looked back over some things and did better investigation work. I think i got some concrete evidence that i had overlooked when all this started. Things get a lot easier the second time around.

My course of action right now is

USED ARP headstuds
Resurface head, hot tank (without disassembling) (edit: hot tank with seals is a stupid idea that has been cancelled)
NEW OEM gasket (no copper spray)
NEW OEM gasket/seals for valve cover
REUSE 2 week old oil (castrol synth)
coolant flush (properly)

this is no news to any forum member that sees overheating problems/threads all summer. it gets old to recommend the same stuff over and over.

MY THOUGHTS and CONCLUSIONS
(at the moment)

i feel that taking pictures is CRITICAL at times like these when things don't go according to plan. As they say on campus, if there are no pics then it didnt happen.:rockon:


Since this is the second time i get Gasket+leak=overheat, i was getting scared that it might not be the gasket after all and i may have a bigger problem to deal with. if the gasket did BLOW and leak, there would be signs of it on the HG and the head.... sure enough i found some incriminating pics. (NOTE: THESE PICS ARE FROM THE 1st HG change)




this is it after it was stored for a day wrapped in plastic and finally brought out for its cleaning. Right off the bat we can see that cylinders 4,3,2 have nasty black in between them.

bad lighting but the carbon buildup is reflecting blue. important here is the head gasket. The thin plastic layer to the left is all crinkly and you can visibly see the steel layer. on the right where i do not think there was a leak, the walls between the circles(cylinders) are in tact.

Close up on the bad side. notice how the carbon buildup doesnt really go anywhere past the two closest coolant passages?

above are cylinders 4,3 (and 2 has a spark plug in it)

above you see some of 3, 2 with a spark plug in it, and cylinder 1.. at this point i had already begun to clean with b12 chemtool and paper towels

above is nothing new.


the pics below are after i used b12 chemtool with papertowels. you can see the carbon buildup is pretty stained into the head where it leaked and not very much between cylinder 1 and 2. (where it didn't leak)




I have no clue what that weird scratching around the hole at the bottom is. it wasnt done by me ill tell u that. weird is that they are not deep, just reflect light differently.

NOTE: that was not the final cleaning, just the first pass.




So this takes a lot off my mind, and i can finally say:

• im SURE the initial prob was HG

• second HG is a result of me not milling the head and the problem returning.

Im running on the assumption that

• the leaking between cylinder 3 and 4 is what caused my multiple cylinder misfires and CEL
• a compression test would have proven the leak, and doing one now WILL still prove the leak, but im not going to go do one.
• A combustion gas leak test would also confirm the HG issue
• not sure what a leakdown test would prove. at this point, i can obviously see where im currently leaking oil from. And also it coincides with the same area the gasket is damaged in.
• I can also conclude that my problems with hesitations (-->missfires) from the past; which i attributed to faulty coil packs, was actually a symptom of my 1st leaky head gasket (loss of compression).

I will start a "Build thread" or somewhere and go through everything since my first misfire a couple days after i bought the car. i will include plenty of pics of everything i found important.

For now, thanks on all the suggestions. if anyone has any more input on my situation, keep bringing things up. but for now im going to be waiting on removing my head so i can get it resurfaced. i will fill everyone back in in a few days

slowcivic2k

Ensure the head and deck on the block is straight, if not it will leak.

Don't use copper spray on the headgasket, it is not needed with a good surface.

Those marks on the dowel of the cylinder head are from a previous removal, someone could not get the dowel out before, probably had one in the block and one in the head, opted to remove the one in the head.