webgreetings.

A Girl friend just bought a TP auto magna, darn thing popped a head gasket just north of grafton due to the radiator cap coming loose. Hired a trailer and rolled it back to her place and started on the removal of the head.

Am following the excellent instructions by magnabuff and have gotten as far as;

remove dissy 12mm

Distributor wont come out past about 15mm from fully seated.

And now it wont go back 'home' either, can still move it 'advance-retard, but not in or out...

Any ideas?

thanks forwards.

rebelart.

Twist and pull, twist and pull. They are in there tight. Some oil may help. Probably gummed up from being old. Lever with a screwdriver under the hold down bit where you took the nut off while doing the twist and pull bit.

thanx max, good to know that they are often in there tight and I haven't got a unique problem.... as we speak it is soaking in WD fluid

okay, the dissy is out of the hole.

next question concernis the timing chain...

I have undone the 22 mm bolt.

But, before I "rest that cam on the cam rest..."

Is there any special thing i need do to stop the cam chain tensioner from jumping out ?

this is the first magna I ever worked on, so all information about the task ahead of me would be greatly appreciated.

The cam rest should hold the cam and cog up without the tensioner jumping out, that is what it is there for. Unless the chain is really stretched, you should be alright. . . . . I hope. Maybe put something like a 1 cm thick piece of scrap wood/metal on the cam rest under the cog before you slide it off to be sure?

Unhook the exhaust manifold and all the bits attached to the carb. Remove the rocker shafts as a unit and undo the headbolts.

Lift the head off with the intake and carb attached but be careful to clear that cam cog and belt. Its heavy, 2 people would be better than one.

okay. thanks to the great advise thus far, she is all apart and that's as all the spanner work I be doing till tomoz as I have reached the logical stopping point.....

The first thing I notice is that I got water in all 4 cyclinders!

So now I ask the following questions to all those who have seen many 2.6 Astrons with blown gaskets....

Is this unusual? I would normally expect to see water in one or 2 cyclinders, not all 4.

the head gasket its self came away easy.

Does this point to a warped head?

or perhaps the head gasket was okay and some how water got sucked in thru a crack in the inlet manifold?

As to how hot it got, it prolly drove 20k's with no water in the radiator.

All thoughts and advices appreciated.

Use the old gasket to work out where the water passages are on the head and look for corrosion.
The coolant in the cylinders is probably from the intake manifold when you took it off but check for coolant in the oil.

Pull the valves out of the head. Take the head to a workshop and get it checked for cracks and softness. It will need a shave to get it flat.
You will need a VRS (valve regrind set) to put it all back together.

thanks max.

Tho, when i was on side of road I pulled out the 4 and 3 spark plug, turned it over and had heaps of water spurt out.
also, before I started to disassemble it, I pulled out number 1 and 2 and am pretty sure water spurted out of all 4....

tomorrow when the sun is shining I will take upload some photos and perhaps everything will be clearer.

my 50 year old back is aching so its, off line and into a hot bath I go.

thanks ever so much for the help so far.

till tomoz ;O)

Sounds ominous.

Clean the surface of the head and block and look for cracks.

If you look at the plugs you can tell if it has been getting water in the cylinders for a while, or if it is a recent event.

PM (personal message) sent.

http://www.aussiemagna.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64638

Day Two = Sunday, which means no Grafton based spare parts places, wreckers or machinists are answering their phones, which has given us time to think this through........ and you totally right MM, ominous is pretty close to the perfect description for this situation, tho dire and diabolical also suit.

This is a $1000 dollar Magna we are talking about here, with 1 month rego that my friend Nikki *bought* 2 days before it blew the gasket from one of her girlfreinds, the only mechanical work I had done to it before we hit the road (I was in passenger seat) was change the spark plugs and fix a vacuum leak. The plugs was worn, no evidence of anything else untoward.

The TP was to replace her 1990 V6 pajero (a 7 seater), which is almost out of rego, needs shockies, a windscreen, a lower control arm bushes and a few other things and for Nikki, like all single mothers on a pension, money is in short supply, so this magna appeared to be the perfect short term transport solution. Idea being to sell the pajero for a couple of grand, then pay the friendly friend for the magna and then put the rest of the cash towards registering the TP, using it to ferry her daughters around town and then, perhaps, buying another car a bit later on in the year.

Thing is, my gut instinct is that we have cooked this Astron and that spending another couple of hundred on the head for machining be a waste of money that could be better put towards a good second hand motor from a wrecker.

Anyway, another friend of Nikkis has come to the rescue with an 1986 lancer, so now it looks like the plan is to buy the lancer, sell the pajero and swap out the motor on the TP, or perhaps, sell the TP to someone who wants to take on the project, its a pretty straight body, good condition auto with O/D, red in colour, GLX blue trim with 127,000 k's showing on the clock.

I remember hearing when I was an apprentice mechanic back in the early 80's, that one 'fix' for a warped head was to use 2 head gaskets, paint them with silverfrost and then torque the head back on. Not sure I want to try this.....

till next

rebelart

Is the head warped or cracked though? Have a good look at the engine before you "fix" it with 2 head gaskets (silly idea) or "get a good second hand motor from a wrecker" (good luck there, sounds impossible to me) and work out exactly what needs doing.

Just sell the TP. It's old and low km, I have come across a few Magnas like that before. The owner rarely gets its serviced on a time basis, the coolant goes off and the head rots away. Take it for a drive after it sat around for years and then the engine pukes. Price a new head or welding and shaving for the head and you will get a rude shock.

im sorry to sound a prick or anything, but you should not have paid 1000 for a first gen

also i have never known head gaskets to just go to the extend you have described in a short drive.

also i have never known head gaskets to just go to the extend you have described in a short drive.

I've come across this twice with older Mitsu engines on the Sigma, head corrosion from sitting around with old coolant. Soft alloy in them. Tap water or poor coolant can rot them away in no time. Newer/more recent heads like the M9 seem to be a better alloy.
Its one of the pitfalls of buying an old cheap car unfortunately.

thanx again for the inputs:

There are no obvious cracks in the head or the block.

I have priced a machining of the head = 65 dollars, also costed a replacement head at 325 + 100 to lap in the valves.

I be taking the head down to the machinist later on today for a straight edge diagnosis.

I totally agree that she oughtn't have agreed to pay 1000 for this Magna, it had been living on the central coast doing duty as a shopping trolley, lots of cold start short run work. Nikki drove it from the central coast to Grafton, it spluttered and farted the whole way and wouldn't start when hot. The first time i opened the bonnet, which was when she picked me up from the train station where it wouldn't start, I was impressed with how hot it was running.

For the record, I had nothing to do with the decision to "buy" this car, in fact had I been asked, I would have said? A 1000 dollars for a 20 year old magna? No way is a 20 year old magna worth 1000 dollars, in fact you would have to give me that magna AND a thousand in cash to take it off your hands, because fer sure it is going to cost me that in the first months.

But, this situation arose because of the cost of getting the pajero reregistered and a friend trying to help a friend and goes to show that one should ALWAYS look a gift horse in the mouth and check out its teeth - not just for age but for signs of decay as well.

As for buying a good motor from a wreckers, here a little bit of inside info on how wreckers price their cars.

The engine is the fastest moving part in a wrecking yard and so the most that a wrecker will pay for a car is about what they know they will sell the engine for, that way every other part on the vehicle is pure profit and it don't matter how long it takes to sell each individual part.

How do I know this? Many years in the sydney car business buying and selling 'cheapies', I had a wholesale dealers license and used to buy the trade ins from larger new and used car dealers, keep the ones that I knew I could sell and sell the one's that was on their last legs to the wreckers, for a while there in the 80's, when ford stopped selling 351 cleveland V8's, I was able to buy rusty old ZF and ZG fairlanes for 100 or 200 dollars and then onsell them to the wrecker for 800 to 1000 entirely because of the engine and the limited slip diff, both of which the wreckers were selling at the time for $1200 - 1500 to dudes hot-rodding their six cyclinder falcons.

I have sold hundreds of cars to wreckers in my time and whilst it's a bit of a lucky dip, wreckers ain't stupid, in fact I found all of them to be very astute buyers who knew exactly what to look and listen for when buying an engine and since most of them provide a limited exchange warranty they rarely make mistakes.

till next.

Confirmed by PowerTorque in Grafton.

The head is warped top and bottom, the helpful dudes at powertorque also pointed out where it is starting to crack, so it looks like the TP is going to end up in the wreckers.

So my next question is....

Will the TP's alternator retro fit onto a 1986 Lancer? Thinking it could, but figure that if anyone would know, it would be one of you guys.......

I figure when we go to pick up the lancer, I will be fitting it with the spark plugs we bought for the TP, thinking they be better than new, have just had them steam cleaned.

till next.