Hey all.

So I just had my engine assembled from the ground up. It is a Type-R bottom with a B16A head. The block was machined, decked, honed, rotating parts were balanced, new pistons, new rods, new oem water pump, new oem oil pump, micropolished and center balanced oem itr crankshaft. Head has new valve bronze guides, seals, valves, lma springs, dual valve springs, locks, retainers, resurfaced and hand ported. After I got home I noticed there was a small oil leak coming from the corner on the front passenger side between the head and block. The weird thing is that it continues to seep out even with the car off. New gaskets and seals everywhere including the distributor o-ring, vtec solenoid gasket, valve cover gasket, cam seals and there doesn't look to be any oil coming from any other spots from the head other than that corner. No oil trail or residue anywhere else, only from that corner.

Some backstory: After getting it assembled and swapped in, on the drive home the car got hot but I did not overheat the car. It has a break-in tune on it and I was very light on the throttle. I pulled over as soon as the needle went pass the halfway mark and Hondata said it was at 230 degrees. I have no coolant/oil mixture checking the dipstick, compression is good and there is no coolant going into the combustion chamber which leads us to believe that the head gasket should be good. Is this leak in the corner suppose to be normal?

Here's a picture of where it's coming from, you'll notice that shiny spot on the corner of the head gasket

 

It's almost always the distributor, vtec solenoid, or cam seal. Even if they are new. It could also be the valve cover gasket - what brand did you use? I haven't had luck with any other brand valve cover gaskets besides OEM.

 

Hey DaX thanks for chiming in. We used new OEM seals on those places that you mentioned. Just yesterday I removed my valve cover and noticed lots of oil on the head where it seals with the gasket. The VC also had lots of oil where the grommets sit on top so I wiped everything down including all the crevices where the gaskets would seal. Installed it back with new VC gasket, new oem grommets and new spark plug seals from the valve cover kit (12030-P73-000). Since I had the vc off I also removed the top front side of the timing belt cover to inspect the cam seal and it doesn't look like there are any leaks including the headgasket.

 

Interesting. Then I guess the next thing I would recommend would be degrease, dry, and then look again to see if you can locate the source. I've heard of some folks using baby powder as an aid to see the trail of oil.

 

Did you install new head studs? If so did you put oil on them before torquing then down? I’ve seen guys do this and then wonder why oil is seeping out of head gasket the oil doesn't stay in the head stud hole.

 

UPDATE - SOLVED

when I took my car to my tuner, he noticed there was fresh oil on the temp sensor plug so he recommended that I replaced the distributor o-ring and put some hondabond around the opening as well. After letting hondabond cure for at least a day, I drove around and now that corner is leak free! thank goodness it wasn't a bad head gasket. We actually solved this months ago but I had forgot to update this thread just in case somebody has the same issue and couldn't figure it out