does this head gasket look blown?
 

i recently did some trading by the great jeep barter system lol and ended up with this 94
the owner told me the head gasket was blown, and it had a knock.

i checked the oil and it was milky on some parts of the dipstick so i suspected it was blown headgasket , and the classic lifter knock

i pushed it into the garage and started to disassemble.

it was to my surprise, when i got the head off, the cylinders had no water/coolant in them, just a bit dirty. (perhaps crud just fell into the cylinder when i took the head off)

what do you think? hope these pix can do justice. cant tell if its blown or not, its a lil bent from taking it off.

Attachment won't open, try uploading to your pic album and then embed to this post. I am interested in taking a look :)


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Should have performed a compression test first.

Right off the bat the compression on the gasket shows there may be an issue with how flat the head is. Have you put a straight edge on it yet?

Definitely check your head with a flat edge, and pay a little bit of money to have your head checked/magnafluxed at a local shop , they can even deck it for you if necessary.
I would go with the thicker MLS head gasket, can be found at your local Carquest/AAP, Napa, etc.

Not just deck it...but increase compression at the same time. :)

i have not put a straight edge to it yet, how can you tell? im very curious, is it the spots on the gasket

for sure im going to take it to a machine shop and have them look at it:thumbup1:

Yes...Both from the Gasket and the block. See how it was compressed more on the ends than it was between cylinder 3 and 4 in the middle? Shiny vrs dark is the indicator for this. I will bring it up bigger to look for oil port to coolant ports for a leak. But as I say it is already suspect because there was obviously combustion leaking between cylinder 3 and 4.


Sign of a possible warped head and I don't see much about that around here but it used to be a very common problem with inline sixes getting hot even just one time. the head is quite long... :)


Just clean it well and get a fairly thick metal yardstick or a long metal construction level and lay it on edge across the head diagonally end to end and see it you have any light passing under it in the middle of the head. If so, gap it with a set of feeler gauges to see how much.

The space between cylinder one and two look kinda suspect, but nothing looks real bad. Doesn't matter now since you have it apart.

Did u drain & inspect your oil?

Deff suspect area...

yeah i did and it was just black.

which was weird cuz it was milky on the dipstick

okay sweet, thanks for that pic.

so i know it over heated, and it knocked. hmmmmmm guess will pull the pan off to inspect the rods. im not sure if it was the lifters making the knock or not.