Haha, only had time to drain the coolant today!

 

One less thing to do tomorrow. Keep at it!

 

Intake off and one head off. No smoking gun except the fact the head bolts were not really as tight as I expected them to be.

Chambers are all consistently colored so nothing to see there.

To satisfy my curiosity, I pulled each lifter out and they look perfect.

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picture of gasket? The pic looks like #6 pushed into the coolant on at the 8:00 position.

 

I would concur.

 

Maybe. I think the real culprit will be on the other side of the motor. I looked at hg and nothing really jumped out at me. Nothing like blown hg's I have had in the past where there was nooooo doubt they were blown.

 

Yep. #3 is definitely my culprit. I also moved the engine to the front (stock location) set of mounting slots in the kmember. Doing so will make quite a few things fit better.

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Yup #3 blew out! How much boost were you running? What was your tune like, timing? AFR?

 

I think it was less about what I did wrong and more about a poor gasket seal. Fire ring looks great. Headbolts were not what I would consider tight. They were very easy to unbolt so we may not have had the proper clamping pressure. This motor was my boy's first build and we never expected it to see boost or nitrous.

 

I've been thinking about this for a bit. I think this time around, we will drop some shorty headers in temporarily, fire it up and heat cycle it a couple of times, then pull the shorty's and re-torque the heads. The headers block the lower set of head bolts so they have to come off anyway to re-torque.

I also think this leaky cylinder is likely a huge contributing factor in the carb tuning weirdness I was having. I may re-baseline the carb and start over with it.

 

It almost looked like you were using 1011-2 headgaskets, prob the biggest piles of crap made, imho. Before you put the 9333 pt2 gaskets on, you need to make sure the surfaces are clean, I mean clean. I usually use a razor blade and when I'm sure it's completely clean, I run a rag with brake clean on it over the surface again and again until it comes up clean. I've had great luck with those head gaskets when I put them on using this procedure.

 

Yep that is what they are. lol. When we were building this motor, my buddy Jonathan had them in his stash so we used them.

 

I have a set of 8548's on the shelf. Seems they have a decent track record from a quick search on here. Run 'em or opt for the 9333? Seems the difference between the two is the fire ring material.

 

9333PT-1 I've run the 8548s and popped them. Put 9333 in and lasted til I goofed.

 

I have 8548 gaskets in my current motor with ARP head bolts in the car with 12 psi and it has been fine so far.
but moving forward I plan on using 9333 because they have such a better reputation.
That is my 2 cents

 

I actually read that thread from 2004!

 

Cool! Didn't know I posted about that back in the day. It sure stuck in my memory bank.

 

Started cleaning up the heads yesterday. Scraped gaskets and hosed them down good with brake clean. I also pulled each lifter, cleaned the bore, hosed the lifters out with brake clean, lubed them and reinstalled them. Can't be too careful when dealing with a flat tappet cam!

 

Heads and block are clean and ready to assemble. Honestly it's probably cleaner than when we built the engine. lol Remember, this engine is the original engine from this car. When we built it, we just honed it and slammed some used stock TRW forged pistons in it with new rings, bearings, etc and a flat tappet Summit cam. Heads are stock D8's with better springs that were actually gone thru by a friend that runs a machine shop.

 

Heads are finally back on! I think I am going to go back to the single plane intake. The moisture I noticed in the valley that I thought was the intake leaking, was probably actually the head gasket. I will double check the china wall gap. I think it is really close, but I think it is okay. I also purchased a set of intake gaskets that properly seal off the exhaust crossover so I should not have any leakage problems there. Most gaskets have a bell-shaped hole in them for the exhaust crossover and the intake just barely seals with that type of gasket. The gaskets I bought do not have a hole at all for the exhaust crossover so they should be good to go.

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