OK I'm back. I wanted to swap out the head today but I didn't.
Instead I hooked my boost controller back up so I'm at 9 psi again (I was at about 5.5 off the spring) and drove the car around because I missed it. Damn that was some fun! I forgot how fucking fast that thing is. With the new DP and cat I'm at full boost at about 3300 RPMs in second. If I WOT, I simply spin and that's from a roll. This is still the best mod ever!
Anyway, I do have to fix this whole leaky headgasket problem so it was time to prep things. If anyone remembers, this is the haunted PnP head that I had the machine shop fix. There was a broken bolt on the outer rocker arm assembly that had been hot-glued back in there. Well, the shop fixed it but left freaking aluminum shavings all over the head. Not that you can tell from this pic, but trust me, they're in there.
This is not good from a friction standpoint. Don't ever let someone give you dry, dirty head.
So I bought 4 cans of carb cleaner and some new assembly lube and went to town on it. I ended up completely tearing it down aside from the valve springs themselves to be sure I got all that crap out of there.
Be sure and label all your parts when disassembling your rocker arms....
Or you can just do like I did and line up all the little chochkies exactly how they came off. It's easier this way since your mitts will be all greasy, so long as you can do the cleaning and re-assembly in one go.
Once all that was done I tried just using carb cleaner and a brush to get the shavings out of the head itself. Yeah, that was a no go.
So it's bath time for baby!
Much better after some hot water and a nice Suave conditioner. I like the strawberry stuff. It smells like Matt.
All the galleys are nice and clean, free of all aluminum shavings. This thing should be fun once I put it on the car. Here she is all buttoned up and re-lubed.
I ran the cam through a few rotations to get the assembly lube spread throughout the valvetrain. I still have to make sure the valve lash is within spec as I have no idea if it was ever set by the guy who did the original install. I'll mess with that tomorrow.
I will have to port match my turbo mani as much as I can since the exhaust ports are pretty hogged out. I should be able to smooth the transition out enough that it won't hurt the performance and cause back pressure right there at the head. That's going to mean a day or two of downtime which I'm not quite ready for. But the whole thing should really only take me two days to swap out with the port matching.
The best thing about this head will be the nice lopey idle (yes, a Civic with a lopey idle, wee!) and all the little ports that look like this!
