I?ve never changed the head gasket in my life. I?m usually scared to crack open the long block. Typically I take the whole motor out and I give it to somebody to work on. With my current budget I said fuck it I need to learn how to do this. I asked for advice from my motor builder and he told me to do: a compression test and a leak down test. He told me to send him the numbers so we can see what happened.
The compression test numbers are kind of weird. Based off of the way the car was behaving at idle I can could tell that exhaust gases were being pushed into the coolant jacket. While I was doing the compression test, cylinder one and cylinder two were pushing compression between the two cylinders and also into the coolant jackets.
Cylinder three it was very concerning because of the broken spark plug porcelain. Jim Heald and I were both worried that the piston was damaged.
Based off of the data that I gathered from the compression test and the leak down test, it was evident that only the head gasket went bad. It didn?t seem like valves were damaged nor was the pistons damaged.
The one thing that I always fear about taking apart a motor is the timing chain. Especially on these dual cam motors the upper timing chain always confuses me. I went ahead and bought paint pens from Walmart and marked everything like a psychopath.
I don?t think I took any photos of it but I also built a workbench so I could lay all the parts out on a nice surface.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk