Sunday 13 January 2013

E21 316: Head Gasket - well and truly blown!

Here are some pics of the blown head-gasket that turned out to be the misfire culprit [from this post: ] and it turned out my forum-eductaed guess was right and it had failed right between the 3rd and 4th cylinders. Kaboom!

No damage to the water/oil galleries thankfully, but still a catastrophic way for the gasket to fail so quickly under a bit of load. You can see best in the bottom pic of the head where the gasket has begun to fail at the left side of cylinder 4, taking that down and then blowing through to cyl. 3. Not good. An examination of the cylinder-head when removed showed that it is warped a tiny bit, so it looks like the engine has been overheated at some point before I got the car and this is probably going to happen again. Oh well, priest-like driving will be the order of the day unless I just go seat-of-the-pants until it goes again, but in the long-term, an M44 engine-swap from a more modern 318is is looking like a must!





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