kalli

hi all,

bad news is i must have my heads fried. I changed the headgaskets, the intake gaskets 4 times I even tried a different intake altogether.
I'm constantly loosing water (internal). It's not going into the oil. oil is perfect and no loss there.
it's smoking the water out the exhaust. sometimes more sometimes less. it always smokes when i start her with full water after about 10 secs and it gets worse from there. when I drive it seems to go away, but that might only be because I lost enough to have no pressure anymore or whatever the reason.
I tried gunk today (crap that is supposed to stop water leaks) but that didn't help. drove 15 miles (quite harsh) and arrived home, switched off the engine and it immediately boiled out my overflow. engine puked it's guts out ....

that's the bad news. question is where am I going.

new TFS heads 1200$ +pushrods 100$ +rockers 300$ +gaskets 100$ + shipping 300$ =2000$ add 10%duty and 21%VAT and i'm at 2600$ to have it at my door (~2000 EUR (my money)) no listing small pieces (washers, dowels) and valvecovers that I might need.

Either I save up for that money or what I could try as well is to try and ****** GT40s off ebay for ~300$
first of all they are used and old (less duty/tax) and i could save money there but shipping of those anchors might break my back. I'm quite sure I'd spend 600$ to have 300$ heads shipped ... sigh .... and maybe they are not in better shape than my old ones.

Some friends are asking around at the moment if there's one seeling 289/302 heads locally and I'll try to source th UK as well


bummer !

Kalli

Starfury

I'd take your heads to a shop to get them checked professionally before declaring them dead.

If they are, I'd go for the TFS heads. They're worth the money, and like you said, less shipping. If you're looking to save a couple bucks, go with some Crane Energizer roller rockers. I think I got mine for $180. Not the prettiest things in the world, but they work fine for me, and I wind my engine up to 6k+.

Starfury

grr, dupe post

kalli

thanks Tad,

i was thinking about shop when I changed head gaskets but I thought it would be an awful waste of money to give them ~200$ for checking my heads and then throw them away. i was thinking checking and cleaning and maybe skimming them will put me down the quarter of the price of a new set, back then I was convinced I'd get new ones as I was looking to get performance gain. now i just want to get that bugger back on the road :-(
maybe I'll just eat porridge for one month ... that should pay for it.

fishkg

That sucks.

When you first posted on this problem, I was fighting a similar issue with a 4 cyl lift truck at work. You went thru the same process we did, replacing gaskets a working your way thru to the head(s). I finally had the head vatted and pressure-tested. It turned up cracked. The only reason I mention it, is because we had a real concern that the block might have been cracked, not the head. I never thought I'd be so "happy" to hear it was a cracked head. I would hate to see you go thru all that expense, and find out the problem is somewhere else.

The fact that the water is turning up in the exhaust rather than the oil seems to point to a head. Maybe drop a header/exhaust manifold and try to isolate which side the problem is on. Cut your cost in half to have just 1 head checked?

Sorry if this causes more confusion.

my77stang

a) use the crane energizers like mentioned already
b) hardened pushrods can be gotten for less than 50 bucks
c) have one of us guys in the states get everything then mail to you, so VAT value can be marked down.

Starfury

Nice new avatar, my77

kalli

thanks for all help and ideas. have changed my rockers (in my virtual shopping list) to CRN-11746-16. will save me 60 bucks alright. thx!

as for the block in trouble I'm convinced that's not the case as otherwise the water would have to end up in oil (sooner or later).
to c) ... .hope customs don't listen in here :-)

as to which side it is: i have a true dual exhaust and thought i could tell from that. but then I figured I have an exhaust crossover in the heads/intake. so that doesn't tell me jack-crap anymore. i think after all that fooling around I don't deserve spending money to get back to where I was. there has to be an improvement (so I think for that it's time for aftermarket heads). If I don't do it now I'll never do it and probably only half year down the road bite me own **** for it

urban_cowboy

Man, I am so sorry. That truly sucks and double for you b/c it is so hard to get stuff shipped.

I ran some quick numbers and it looks like AFR 165 heads may make you some extra hp at peak. The TF TW heads flow better on the intake, but not as good on the exhaust when compared to the AFRs. The TF TW heads also use a 2.02 intake valve where the AFR uses a 1.9. Check around, if you have not already, b/c this may cause you some clearance issues depending on your cam specs and piston valve reliefs/dish/dome.

Starfury

The TwistedWedge heads alter the valve angles to increase valve clearance, hence the larger valves. Due to this design, they also tend to flow better under .500" lift than most other heads.