- Joined
- May 26, 2001
- Messages
- 2,893
You can blow the gasket into the lifter valley and never loose coolant. But the ticking noise will get louder and louder as the gasket blows more and more. Eventually it will start to sound like an un-capped log truck coming down the road. I've had two sets blow like this on me in the past, as well as a set blow to the outside of the block and have no coolant loss or contamination. Each time it was either on cylinder #4 or #3, most of the time it was on #3. I would much rather blow a gasket than to drive over the crank cause the gasket never failed. To me, Headgaskets are the fuses to our fragile engines. The trick is to tune for absolutely zero knock retard on high boost and good race gas, and less than 3* KR on pump gas boost levels. With todays pump gas formulas tho, it's almost impossible to tune for zero KR. This is one reason why alky has really caught on as of late, not to mention the crazy power you can make when running alky.
There comes a point that even with zero knock retard, the heads start to lift and you can blow a gasket without KR. This is due in part to our wonderfully designed heads and their shoddy 4 bolt per cylinder design. Ah well, it's the nature of the beast I guess. FWIW, I recommend over the counter GM Victor gaskets if you can still find them, then the Fel Pro 9441s from any parts store as second choice. I have found that the original Victor gaskets had slightly more graphite material to their make up than the Fel Pros did. I wish I would have taken pictures of all the gaskets I've tried back in the day. 7 sets in all. I had best luck with the Victors from the GM Parts Dept, and would always put some miles on them with a retorque on the aluminum heads before getting crazy with the boost. AKA anything over 15psi.
HTH
Patrick
There comes a point that even with zero knock retard, the heads start to lift and you can blow a gasket without KR. This is due in part to our wonderfully designed heads and their shoddy 4 bolt per cylinder design. Ah well, it's the nature of the beast I guess. FWIW, I recommend over the counter GM Victor gaskets if you can still find them, then the Fel Pro 9441s from any parts store as second choice. I have found that the original Victor gaskets had slightly more graphite material to their make up than the Fel Pros did. I wish I would have taken pictures of all the gaskets I've tried back in the day. 7 sets in all. I had best luck with the Victors from the GM Parts Dept, and would always put some miles on them with a retorque on the aluminum heads before getting crazy with the boost. AKA anything over 15psi.
HTH
Patrick
