[Anthony10370]

Ok so after getting the engine pulled and on a stand I started disassembling and cleaning it. The reason I am rebuilding is because Cyl #6 had about 6:1 compression with some coolant in the cylinder - so it was probably lower than that due to the volume of the coolant. This lead me to believe the head gasket was blown. All the other cylinders have perfect 8.5:1 based on 14.7 PSIA. The car has 131,828 miles on what I believe to be the original ODO.

Engine on stand:




Here is getting the first head off. I found these nice extended 3/8 drive allen keys which helped with taking the cam off. I forgot to drain the block from the core plugs so I introduced some more coolant and other junk into the cylinder when I removed the head.




Got the fuel injection, water bridge, and oil "seperator" off the top.



Oooo that's some nasty junk. And I'm thinking I need a new starter ring gear.






sludgy oil pan (on the outside):




And after some "brake clean":



Can you tell the difference???:




This is wallnut shell blasting the cylinders using an abrasive blast gun and about 95 psi (60 running psi):



So it turns out that the compression leak was (what I believe to be) mainly from the sparkplug hole. Someone musn't have torqued the sparkplug properly and it backed out 3 or 4 threads and the threads in the head got carboned up stopping the sparkplug from seating all the way and sealing. This also explains why I could hear the "tssst" of the compression leaking so clearly when I was cranking.

But this theory still doesn't explain the coolant in the cylinder.