Looking for some 2nd opinions. The headgasket on my car was leaking coolant into the #3 cylinder causing a 3-cylinder start up. Was a minor leak that only occured when the cooling system was left pressurized, coolant would drip into the cylinder. Compression test did not even turn up low #'s on the #3 cylinder because of this.
Anyhow here is a picture of the failure spot on the gasket. Again, it was on the #3 cylinder, on the side of the cylinder which is closest to the exhaust manifold.
Also im not sure if this is normal or not, but this is the only spot where the gasket seemed to be 'eaten through', atleast in a large area like this. It was also right by where the ring split in two.
Here is a shot of the cylinder head when it was removed.
I am just curious as to what you all think could have caused the fire ring to split in two like this? The engine does have 90k miles on it and to my knowledge was never opened up this far. It was never overheated either.
Does this look like it just gave up with age or should i be looking into another cause such as a lean running condition? I am running the FRWilk chip..and i am strongly leaning (no pun intended here
) towards having the car dyno'ed with a wideband O2 to see how the AFR's are. I find it hard to believe the chip caused this as ive been running with it for over 20k miles (and almost two years)..but i would like to double check for peace of mine anyhow.
This isnt entirely a disaster as it gave me the chance to address alot of things ive been meaning to do. Change the fuel lines, clean the bellhousing grounds, change the heater control valve, have the head rebuilt and clean up a few areas of the engine bay. I should have the head back tomorrow but wont be able to start working on putting it back together until the weekend. Hopefully i will have this thing running again by sunday.