My motor was in need of a head gasket job BADLY. At it's worst, I was topping up with water between trips and that was as much as several times a day. A bit of background on the motor: it's a JDM ZC non-VTEC which makes it the JDM equivalent of a USDM D16A6.
So with the help of e.lo, we began what we thought would be a one day job
Things began simply enough; valve cover, fuel rail, etc removed.
This was the cheapo gasket kit as well as a timing belt, water pump and tensioner.
Intake and Exhaust manifolds were removed and the head came off. Here's what fucked us up though. A head stud snapped off as we were removing it with a chunk remaining in the block.
Here's what we found! About an inch of water in cylinder #4
e.lo was surprised I didn't hydrolock this motor. I had been driving like this for 2-3 weeks haha.
With the block kind of fucked, e.lo decided he'd get started on cleaning up the head. I'll post this as a side to side comparison so you can see the amount of work done.
We clearly needed some help so luckily e.lo's dad was willing to save us and so the drilling began..
Here's the little shit that caused us a lot of man hours and delays.
Block and pistons were cleaned up. New headgasket went on.
So with everything cleaned up, we slapped the head on thinking it would be fine. WRONG. The fucked up hole would no longer hold torque. Again, e.lo's dad bailed us out by using a helicoil. With that in place, we were able to get the stud to hold torque.
Intake manifold was greasy as shit. It was cleaned up and reattached with a new gasket of course. The EF will get an oil catch can in the future but that sure as shit won't happen before the EK gets one
Voila! Job complete. It only took us about 7 days longer than expected lol.
Head gasket job on the D series.... NEVER AGAIN.