My head gasket diagnosis pictures - 3 years ago

3 years ago, at ~180k miles my 2013my head gasket failed. It had some stumbling going away from stop signs and maybe at cold start and a misfire code. It also had minor coolant loss. The problem wasn't noticeable for very long before I did the repair - probably just a matter of a few weeks.

The car has 230k miles now and is doing really well.

Before I took the engine apart, I also looked inside the combustion chambers with a borescope and noticed a drip of water going down the side of cylinder 1. This roughly correlates to the spot I saw once I had the thing apart and noticed bare spots in the gasket. unfortunately, I didn't save those pictures.

I used a block test kit to 'confirm' the failure though I think there was plenty of other evidence of the problem.

I have had the car since around 20k miles and it is well maintained. We use this car preferentially for short trips, so the 180k miles were relatively high duty cycle of starts/stops which I think is the big factor in wearing the gasket.

 

I didn't do any work to the head or block other than clean up what I could do at home. I know that best practice would be to take the head to a machine shop. My engine had not overheated or had anything else obviously bad happen to it, so I took this shortcut. I did have the pertinent factory pages and I followed the instructions for the sealing materials fairly closely. I used torque wrenches on most things. My point is that other than not going to a machine shop, I tried to do this slowly and correctly.

Bear in mind, this was 3 years and 50k miles ago so I have at least gotten away with this for that long.