On Thursday last week the head was finished up and I a couple of days off work to finish this up and slap it all back together. My dad cleaned up the top of the pistons between jobs so that was a bonus haha
One freshly cleaned and rebuilt head
The reason for the loss of compression in cylinder 5 was a leaky exhaust valve that wasn't fully seating.
As seen by the lack of a shiny ring.
Compared to the intake valve of the same cylinder.
The valve guides we loose as a goose and I'm sure the seals were toast too. I didn't actually look. The head itself had a lovely warp on so that was machined flat again. I can't remember how much had to be removed though.
Here's the head back on and torqued down ready to rumble. After putting everything back together and flushing the engine of coolant and any other garbage we fired it up.
Things did not go well.
cylinder 5 was not firing so we checked plugs, leads, connections everything we could think of. Popped the rocker cover off and sure enough the exhaust valve lifter was solid in any position. The head re builder didn't think to check the valve stem length after the seats were re cut and it was too long. We loosened off the cam caps and the lifter became free. Basically at this point I'd given up. We pushed it back into the workshop over the pit and there it sat for the weekend.
Monday rolled around and the head re building company told us to pull it back down and they'll fix it up properly. I'm sure the guy who did the work just had a brain fart and forgot check things. Monday night after work the head was pulled down AGAIN and taken to them on Tuesday. They finished their work on Tuesday afternoon and we reinstalled it on Tuesday evening. Thankfully when I was ordering parts I bought a head gasket by itself and sometime after I found someone selling a top end seal kit so I had a spare head gasket.
Everything is back together and running pretty good. It actually heats up to temp a lot quicker now that it has a thermostat in it
