Sandy wrote:ericvm wrote:
was there something wrong with your base gasket? Why did it disintegrate?
Ya,Bountyhunter...wth?
What caused it to fail so prematurely?:huh:
All I know is the gaskets were in a new Athena rebuild set. The material they used for the base gasket must be too brittle for the stress. It gets the full torque of the head bolts (360 inch-pounds) and it shattered and disintegrated when it got hot (first fire up). The cracked pieces of gasket were literally "crawling" out of the gap between the cylinder and crankcase.
I had used a thin line of RTV above and below the gasket (on the metal surfaces) which stayed in the joint so it didn't start leaking oil.... but the gasket pieces came out enough to let the cylinder shift slightly allowing a tiny gap at the cylinder-to-head interface and the compression suddenly dropped to about 40 psi and the engine quit running altogether. Releasing the head torque and retightening did restore compression but I knew I had to replace the gasket. Looking down from above, the disintegrating gasket was also heading INWARD and would have eventually started falling into the oil pan.
The head gasket in the Athena set was good quality. All the other gaskets (including the valve cover gasket) were worthless crap. I did use the oil pan gasket made of the same brittle material, but it hasn't failed (yet) I think because the pan only gets about 100 inch-pounds of torque on it. No way to tell by looking the material is no good.
