OK so I put about 5 hours in to the car tonight and got to the point I wanted to be when I put my tools down. I thought about doing a DIY on how to change a HG, but it's too fucking cold out to be messing with taking pictures of each and every step that I just do now without even thinking about it.
Here she is all unsuspecting, wondering why she's up on jackstands again.....
I've been smelling a faint burning oil smell lately so it was really, really time to get this done since the HG kept getting worse and worse. When I dumped the coolant, there was all kinds that black HG stuff in it. Not what you want to be seeing in your radiator fluid. Sorry, no pic of that one.
The car has been pushing a lot of condensation into the catch can lately - another sign of my leaky HG - and had started to eat coolant instead of just pushing it back into the reservoir. When I pulled the DP off, this is what I saw.
Those are beads of water inside. Not good. If my DP looks like that, I'll guarantee my cylinders look the same. Hopefully I've caught it before it's too late.
So I ripped some stuff off.
This takes a lot longer to do on a boosted car than it does on a stock Civic. There is so much shit in the engine bay that needs to come off or be moved out the engine bay, it's not even funny. But I soldiered on. Here is where she was just prior to me pulling the head off.
The gasket was fucked, I could see that pretty easily, but at least the cylinders and pistons looked OK.
I won't know for sure until I re-install everything and run a compression test. I should have the whole thing done by Sunday. I'll swap over all the sensors to the new head, check the valve lash, and coat my new gasket with some copper spray tomorrow. I'm not taking any chances for this one to fucking leak. Then I'll button everything up on Sunday and tune it on Monday.
Here's where she sits tonight. Thank God I've done this a few times and remember where everything goes!
