Re: Tom's 392

[John Hofstetter <hofs@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 8/5/03 10:18 AM, tsm1@domain.elided at tsm1@domain.elided wrote:

> No obvious (to me) signs of headgasket failure. I'll get pictures.

Tom, 

When a head gasket goes, it usually, (trying to say always) either lets the
gas into the coolant, or leaks across into the adjacent cylinder. Your
compression was OK in number 5, so that's not the leak, if there is one. If
it was leaking into the coolant, then it would cause overheating of the
engine. I've never seen a leak into the coolant bad enough that you'd get 0
compression. I've seen a lot of engines, however, that leak gas into the
coolant without the coolant coming into the cylinder. However, if the leak
was severe enough to cause 0 compression, then I'd expect the coolant in the
cylinder. 

I would think you'd have seen evidence of this when you checked the
compression, if this were the case.

Ed suggests in a post that it may be the cam. That would be really crappy.
That doesn't sound likely to me considering the few miles that the engine
had on it, but ....

John Hofstetter