The new head gaskets were ordered from Burton Power on Tuesday.
The heads are going off to be tested and skimmed at Ferriday Engineering tomorrow
Today Alan started to strip the engine down. He phoned me at work to ask how soon i could get home, when i asked him why his reply was.
" I have to lifeguard pistons 2 & 3".
Following a closer inspection no visible cracks have been dectected in the top of the block. The head gasket on this side of the engine was looking fairly battered. We then started to look at the time line of his problem and it stems from when we first built the engine.
1. The head gasket blew on this bank of the engine whilst being dyno'd (after running in for 200 miles).
2. We changed the haed gaskets from standard ones to velpro gaskets
3. After a couple of successful track days, the pressurising problem appeared.
4. We changed the heads for modified ones and the car seemed better for a while. (We didn't change the gaskets as we had been told they were re-useable).
We decided to check the original heads to see if there was anything on them that might have damaged the gaskets......What we found was this
Either side of piston 2 we could get a 4 thou feeler guage in
. We compared this to the current heads that we are running No gap.
It appears that one of the original heads was slightly warped, coupled to the fact that we originally torqued the heads down to 95, now torqued down to 115. This caused the original, standard gasket to blow. It also weakend the velpro gasket that was subsequently fitted.
This however is still only our summise. The current heads are still going to be checked and skimmed and new velpro gaskets fitted, if nothing else this will eliminate another possible cause.
. Your description of what was happening to your car sounds identicle to our problem. I had intened to inspect the block when we take the heads off this Friday. Now i'll be having a much closer look.
. All the things that we were planning to do to the second engine for next year we can now put some of them in place now.
