dualblade

why does it look like a bird crapped on my pistons?


is this the way carbon looks on valves? is it supposed to crystalize (it seems to have on one valve)? am i making diamonds with all my carbon?


check out these ports that are filled with some mucky stuff. is that some junk from the headgasket? are those supposed to be plugged like that? it doesn't seem like it....

Yabo

why are you doing this? blown head gasket?

Campeck

oooo...that looks REALLY funky...
I'de like to know as well.

Cyrus951

I've never seen anything like that.
Curiousity, what kind of oil/antifreeze were you running?

AznDrgn

It looks like some kind of contamination or an extremely hot combustion chamber. Does your motor run hot? how is the a/f ratio? how are your driving habbits? Do you stomp the pedal a lot?

dualblade

castrol 10w-30

zerex antifreeze supposedly safe for aluminum engines. it was not the phosphate free stuff as i didn't know how important that was at the time that the car was running. it's been down for a while now and i have gained quite a bit of knowledge so i know better now.

never seen anything like what? my pigeoned pistons, my blingin' diamond valves, or my mucky water(?) passages. cause they're all new to me. if the mucky stuff is part of the water cooling system, i would not be surprised, as i'm pretty sure the previous owner used some stop leak crap in the car. it also stopped up the inlet to the heater core but i fixed that a while back

Matt H

Andrew, it looks like someone was running straight water for a long time. Do you have any shots of the gasket?
__________________
Best Car Insurance | Auto Protection Today | FREE Trade-In Quote

dualblade

the temp was never especially cool or steady, but it never overheated either. i was always very careful about watching that. a/f i have no idea about. the o2 sensor may be bad. it was on the list to change, but i haven't had a chance yet. as far as driving habits, i drove the heck out of the car. it hit redline every day, but i always changed the oil on time and it never overheated. i've only been driving the car for about 6000 miles of it's 135k so chances are that what i've done hasn't influenced the car's condition too much. i never really felt like it ran especially smoothly and had always wanted to open up the motor and see why. now that it has low compression in 3 cylinders, i don't have much of a choice and the engine has to come apart. the car wouldn't start and a shop did a leakdown test and it seemed like piston rings were the issue. it was suggested that i pour some marvel mystery oil into the cylinders and let it soak to perhaps free up the rings in case they were stuck. didn't work so here i am

Scuba Steve

If the O2 sensor was going out, wouldn't that make it run rich? Either that or a vac leak might explain some of the carbon. Were the spark plug tips fouled?

Danno

How many miles on that car? What was your compression & leakdown numbers?

It really doesn't look that bad for a high-mileage, 100K-mile+ car. Usually with this mileage, wear and tear on the rings lets some oil through as well as oil-stem seals and guides. The "gunk" is the paper/fibre headgasket which corrodes over time from the coolant.

dualblade

shots of the head gasket. the first one is very large but i wanted it to have good detail. the next 2 are the two possible problem areas that i see.


this part of the gasket looks like it exploded upwards. it's raised about half an inch. this may have happened when i removed the head and it just pulled the gasket apart


here it looks like corrosion and cracking but i'm not really sure


danno, the engine has 135k on it and i'm not convinced it was taken care of very well based on the rest of the car and how it ran.

i was thinking of steam cleaning everything to get rid of the grease and gunk and stuff. can you steam clean an aluminum head, or will this warp it?

i'm sure there will be lots of pictures and questions posts as this is the first time i've ever seen the inside of an engine. my car knowledge has been acquired by working on my car so if i haven't done the job yet then i don't know it.

Peckster

You don't steam clean them, you use a hot tank, orwhatever it's called.

Scuba Steve

I don't know about steam cleaning... my guess is some of the junk might wind up around the pistons and that wouldn't help things any.

Travis - sflraver

When I pulled the head off the turbo it had black scale flaking off the pistons. The walls were fine but everything was just black and scaly.
The car had 80'000 miles and was driven extremely easily before I got it. I guess I should have took some pics before everything got cleaned up.

Danno

The crumbling on the headgasket is due to softening over time by the coolant, no big deal, it was just a matter of time. You can clean the head using a wire-brush attachment on a die-grinder. Not sure how to clean the pistons without getting crud down the cylinders. Perhaps use the wire-brush attachment and put a nozzle on a shop-vac and aim the wire-brush debris towards it.