A friend and I are changing a head gasket on another friend's car and knowing that it had a very slight leak of coolant into oil, and oil out, we have found these erosion problems upon cleaning the head surface.





The second one looks really bad in the pic, but is magnified about 3 times with my camera (just for reference).

The new gasket is a double metal, with a crush layer in the middle. We are debating on having the head milled smooth to remove these areas, but are wondering if we should have the money spent. Initial guess is yes, but if people have had sucess stories with new gaskets solving old problems, we would like to save him some money. Looking for some opinions on the subject, before we take it to the shop.

Thanks,

Matt

 

i dont know the answer but youd have to mill alot to clean up the on in the 2nd pic

-Eric

 

Thats what we were thinking as well, good observation.

 

Nobody has had any success with problems this bad?

 

Mill it, better to be safe than sorry.

 

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On the second one depending how deep the pitting is, and how minimal you want the milling to be, a machine shop should be able to weld up the pits and then just machine the head to the original height.

 

if you are not wanting to loose compression you can get a thicker head gasket to make up the difference of the mill

the stock head gasket is just a smidgeon under .030" so you can get a .043" head gasket and have .013" removed without any problems in timing at all

 

what u talking about lose compression

milling the head raises compression bro

not loses

 

i meant to say if you mill the head you will raise compression and by gettin a thicker head gasket you will offset teh compression gain if you wanted to retain stock compression

 

Thanks for the info guys, we took the head to the shop and the gentleman there said that he has milled worse. The engine is bone stock, so I didn't think the slight bump in compression would have much of an effect, maybe just having to run at/above 91.

We will hopefully be getting it back before the weekend, and will have the car running by Sunday.


Modified by UTCiv at 8:10 AM 4/2/2004

 

how much is he gonna mill it down???

 

The guy at the shop said he was authorized to go .010" and thought ours would be under that.