Update:
Had myself a nice long weekend. Where do i start? Saturday morning.
How about here with a 3.0L engine that supposedly has high miles and is consuming coolant and blowing white smoke out of the exhaust.
My son coming out to help dad. Hes only a year old, but man does this boy love to wrench. He didn't want to leave dad at all and cried the rest of the day (according to mom). Even picked up my screwdriver and attempted to insert it in every hole of my front cross-member.
Ok back on topic. Whats going on in this picture? First off you will notice the heads are off. Also, will notice that I have all new timing componentry from the last rebuild, new oil pump, new water pump, new felpro steel w/permaseal headgaskets (the good stuff). You may also notice the dent in my lower firewall. Pretty sure my trans has been removed and serviced at some point.
So what would normally be found underneath a head gasket? An engine block? Nope, how about a steel shim. Yea, this is what was used to apparently shim my heads. Yes the heads were decked, but I check the indicators and it appears to be minimal. Could this be the cause of my burning coolant???
I removed the shim and then had a look at the deck surface. You can see that the last re-builder felt it was important to use "Copper Spray-A-Gasket" to adhere this shim to my block. :/
Im sure by now your eye is able to start to see which cylinder is all sparkly from the coolant steam cleaning that has been going on. Cylinder # 5 here is where the play has been happening. Hard to tell anything yet, other than those pistons are clean, and im pretty certain they arent the originals. Also notice that every cylinder has been battered pretty well by some debris that pounded them into the heads.
After a quick wire wheel cleaning of the gasket material we get this. I believe the lower left section where the coolant passages have the minor pitting is where the water was seeping into the cylinder. Luckily neither the head nor block suffered any pitting across the fire ring (unlike my Ram 50). All I did was take some 200 grit sandpaper and gently clean up the block. Surfaces cleaned up well. I will note however that both heads felt well under torque. Yes, it felt like they had maybe 40 Ft Lbs at max. On the ram I used the breaker bar and had to lean into it a bit while the bolts made a light creaking sound before letting go. These weren't close to that.
To be continued...
