Although I have been down this road myself, this one is not mine, nor a clients .
One of my good friends is also in the biz. He manages a dealer body shop .
He called me over the weekend for some help . He has a really nice 1968 camaro ss 4 speed with a pretty healthy small block. 10:1, 2 4 bbls, big knarly cam etc.
Any how, he was trying to get it running after sitting for a few seasons,and somehow lost the little washer for one of the air cleaners .
Knucklehead, started the car, and moved it from his house garage about 200 yards to his other garage where he could work on it better
. He said it was making a " tingy " sound .
He plied me with beers, and let my son use his pool, so I went over there Saturday night , pulled all his plugs, and stuck my borescope down the cylinders .
Cylinder #5 ate the washer, and as you can probably imagine, there is abstract art in there .
My advice was to not even bother extracting the washer, its time to pull the head, and evaluate . Most likely needs at least piston, and probably some valve work . As far as we can tell from borescoping, the cylinder walls look o.k. The piston, looks like a mad man took a hatchet to the surface , and the intake valve looked pretty beat up as well . I could see significant denting around the edge of the piston , directly above ring lands .
He sent me pics yesterday showing he got the washer out and said the car seems to run ok after replacing the plugs . A mechanic at the dealer told him to just send it .
I say, he is just kicking the can down the road, with all those dents on the piston crown, he will get detonation , and most likely , the top ring is pinched in the top groove . The one valve really took a beating and could possibly fail. A loose valve head in a cylinder is game over ...
He just wants to cruise it for the rest of the season . No way Id be taking that chance with my own stuff, thinking it will only cost more later .
Here are the photos he sent me . Trust me when I say, the piston in this photo looks waaaaay better than the image I saw when I was scoping it .
I threw in a photo of my buds GT3, that I inspected yesterday just because this is a porsche site, and it was in the same group of photos in my phone .
