Renegade15

I got my heads off finally and have some questions about the condition of the pistons and valves. The back driver’s piston looks the most different. I did wipe coolant out of the cylinder which is why there is some residue removed from the bottom of the piston, but otherwise I haven’t cleaned anything yet. I understand this or the other rear cylinder are the typical location of head gasket failure, but I don’t see a true blown out seal section like I have seen when researching hg failure. Any thoughts on this? The other question I have on pistons is just if anyone sees anything else worrisome. I have not cleaned anything else yet, wanted to see what y’all thought?

My question on the valves is what causes this scaly buildup on some of the valves? I’ve had several gm 350 small blocks apart previously and never seen this scaly deposit. I was not planning to do much to the heads/valves other than clean them out. I’m going to check out the head surface tomorrow for trueness but until then wanted to get some opinions on this. Thanks!

osv

combustion byproducts, contaminated with egr residue and blowby from the inside of the engine, getting sucked back into the intake via the pcv system? what's the inside of the intake manifold look like? on the 22re it's a nightmare to clean out.

i'd take the heads to an automotive machine shop, get a valve job done including new valve stem seals.

looks like the water jackets are plugged up pretty badly with rusty scale, try to clean it out, but without dropping the chunks back down into the block... i wonder what the inside of the radiator looks like? the 22re has a block plug where it can apparently can be flushed, never tried it tho.

is that a hole in the the exhaust manifold? getting the manifold off could be a battle.

Renegade15

Thanks for the thoughts on this. I know the EGR is probably not acting right, check engine has come on and off stage entire time I’ve had it but since we don’t have emissions I haven’t bothered investigating too much since it runs great, even gets pretty decent mileage, similar to what others report. I am definitely going to everything as clean as possible but given this is a beach cruiser/ fun vehicle I picked up dirt cheap, $2k, I am not inclined to spend much on it. Even with the hg failure, the thing ran great!

As far as the terrible looking water passages I think it was a combination of old/wrong coolant, and I also think someone tried barrs leak seal, I think that is the pasty goo I found in one passage. I’ll definitely try to flush as much of that out as possible before reassembly! I’ll look for a plug that may help with that.