Head erosion

[clarkspeed]

Has anyone ever seen a head erode like this? The head has only been run for a few months. 4 out of 5 cylinders show some signs of this. Most of it is at the head gasket seal but some of it worked into the chamber. There were no signs of water leakage.

 

[Mack]

wow! I have never seen anything like that on an Lseries head, and I have a head that blew a headgasket violently.... There was some small erosion around some of the waterjackets, but nothing like that. what brand of headgasket did you use? perhaps it was built with a metallurgically incompatible metal or something to that effect??

 

Mack

[dot]

I had that on my heads too. (V12) I milled the heads and switched to a gasket with a S/S ring on it last summer. I wanted to switch to the pure glycol coolant but couldn’t find it up here.

Time will tell.

[Guest Hubbo]

When I bought my 280zx it never seem to run quite right.

I finally came around to pulling the engine apart. Apart from broken rings, some scaring etc, the water passages had eaten through to a couple of the cylinders cambers on the head.

 

If you want any pics, give me a yell. I'll have to grab the head and put it in front of the web cam.

 

EDIT: Your pic looks like a new head compared to mine.

[clarkspeed]

I don't think it is from water. Everything looked like it was sealing and there was no leak path from the water passages. I still had great compression and no signs of a gasket leak although I suspect it would be coming soon. This head has about 1-2K miles since I last took it off. I am wondering if the copper gasket sealer reacted somehow with the aluminum.