Changing head gasket questions???
 

I just removed the head from my 7m and this is what I saw. It looks embarrassingly horrible. If anyone knows or thinks they know where it may have came from I'm all ears.

Paul[IMG]file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/paul/Desktop/13022008%28005%29.jpg[/IMG][IMG]file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/paul/Desktop/13022008%28003%29.jpg[/IMG]

i cant see a good pic of it but is all the pistions like that?

Yeah, it feels like a sandy gritty substance, comes off easy.

if it black its just carbon build up i would just clean it off and dont worry about it. as long as it did not do any damage to the pistions like deep cuts

nfi what it is. didnt come over the bottom of the head did it? is it metalic?

What were the syptoms before you took the head off?

What does the bottom of the head look like?

From those pics, I would say look at the cylinder walls closely for vertical scratches, and see if the crosshatching pattern is still visable in any of them.

I would also suspect that the head gasket was bad between the #5 & 6 cylinders from the clean spot between those cylinders, but the #6 piston still has carbon build up, so no coolant was getting in there.

But those pics are pretty crappy to be honest.

Ray.

Sorry guys bout those pics, will get better ones tonight.

I was driving from Auckland to Hamilton, bout 200 kilometres. 3/4 the way down I ran out of water, temp got right up there. Anyway filled it back up slowly while engine was running. I was driving home from work the other week 30 kilometres and temp got right up there again, but once I got the radiator cap off, found it still was 3/4 fill. Once filled up, I noticed small air bubbles surfacing from radiator while enigne was idling.

Are any of the pistons or cylinders or valves much cleaner than the others?

The coolant leaking into the combustion chamber will usually clean whichever cylinder that is bad, but maybe not if it was a small break and you didn't drive on it very much.

Pics of the bottom of the head, or of the gasket itself might help. Only if you were careful while removing the gasket.

Ray.

I finally got round to taking more pictures, hopefully these will be good enough to make judgement. I just turned the head over for the first time to inspect it and found two inlet valves had some type of strands of grey fibre or linen stuck in it, could it be part of the head gasket?

what distro do you use ?