head gasket pics

[kevmalvarez]

hey guys i lifted the heads off my gs650gl today expecting to find a completely destroyed head gasket, but the gasket itself actually doesn't look terrible. everything around it is covered in oily/metallic/gravely crap. so i'm looking for opinions, do you think its the head gasket, or something else?

thank you all in advance for all of your help, ive never been into an engine before and i'm feeling like this is way out of my league.



^^^This is the #4 cylinder and it looks worse than the others. the bike was firing out lots of blue smoke only out of the right side exhaust....

[Nessism]

What is the problem you are trying to solve by removing the head?

[OLDENUFF]

Looks like the head gasket was leaking across the front where all that sludge has built up. Replace it with a new OEM one. They are multilayered steel and should last forever.

[kevmalvarez]

basically what happened is that the bike developed a petcock leak that i didnt immediately detect. so the crankcase was full of gas and oil. i rode the bike like that for about 5 mins until it died on me and wouldnt start back up. i replaced the petcock and now the bike would start and idle but it wouldn't rev or pull. it also developed an oil leak and would blow lots of blue smoke out of the right exhaust pipe. so my initial thoughts were head gasket...

here's what the outside of the engine looked like before i pulled it apart.


and here's what the plugs look like in order from left to right (1,2,3,4)

[mike_of_bbg]

Well oil (particularly a thin oil/gas mixture) can get past gaps where there appears to be no damage. It seems almost certain that the head gasket was leaking. Now that you've removed the head, you cannot be certain if you've disturbed the base gasket or not, so it's a good idea to pull the cylinders and replace that too and its o-rings. That gives you an opportunity to check your ring gaps and free end gap. Do you know if the head gasket was replaced before, and when?

Check also for leaks around the cam chain tensioner. It would be convenient to rebuild now, and the parts to do so are probably all of $10 or so...

[49er]

That engine is drawing through lots of oil past the rings. It's coming up mainly on the inlet side of the piston and is leaving that nice shinny clean surface on the piston tops. This may be due to high mileage, or the results of a barn find restart.

You need to inspect the bores for signs of grooving/gouges. This often occurs when a bike has sat for years, and is started up before using penetrating oil to beak any rusting points between the top rings and the bores. If oil is not used, part of the rings break away from the bores and start gouging grooves into the bore surface, allowing oil to bypass the rings. However, I think that the cause is probably due to high mileage, or a serious overheating of the engine at some time. I say this, because all the bores show some degree of oil bypassing the rings. Usually a barn find start up will only mark 1 or 2 bores, not all of them. Either way, you will need to tear it down to fix the problem.

[tom203]

Was this bike running well last summer, before this years "italian tune up" episode ? Hard to believe that sludge just appeared/forced out by gas in crankcase problem. What's your mileage?
Anyways, you got some work to do - show pic of valves please.

[Homie]

The gasoline dilluted oil in the crankcase "washes'' the pistons, rings and cyliders "clean" instead of lubricating them. The dilluted oil just doesn't have the necessary viscosity to lubricate and seal the pistons and rings to the cylinder walls and subsequently blows past the rings and into the combustion chamber. This can be a real engine killer if it isn't detected in time. Hopefully you caught it in time before it could do serious damage to your engine.

Clean it up the best you can WITHOUT working the pistons over too much otherwise you will get too much "junk" down between the pistons and cylinders which lead to future problems. Carefully inspect your cylinder walls to make sure there isn't any scoring from the lack of proper lubrication. Put a new head-gasket on it and reassemble and adjust the engine as necessary. Put some fresh spark-plugs in it and drain and refill the crankcase with a high quality oil. Start it up. With any luck it will only smoke for a little bit as it burns off the residual oil and you can get back out on the road.

Good luck!

[kevmalvarez]

Was this bike running well last summer, before this years "italian tune up" episode ? Hard to believe that sludge just appeared/forced out by gas in crankcase problem. What's your mileage?
Anyways, you got some work to do - show pic of valves please.

yes the bike was running well last summer. its always been a bit testy when cold, but once warm could run all day. it only has 13,000 miles on it, give or take a few hundred... about the valves though, the manual I have says i need a valve spring compressor tool, which i don't have access to... so i need to get one or find a buddy to borrow one from. (please forgive my ignorance, before this the most i'd done to this bike was the carb rebuild)

[kevmalvarez]

i just removed the block itself and took these pics, the problem is that this being very new to this i'm not really sure what i'm looking for because nothing appears obviously broken... btw the inside of the cylinders are pristine, no gouges etc.







^^this is the piston from the 4th cylinder, the one that looked the worst

[hampshirehog]

All looks ok - I would put that piston cleaning down to the petrol in the oil. You have a job on your hands there to make sure that none of that crap gets down inside the sump.

[platinum2]

might be cheaper and easier to have a machine shop lapp the valves , they can put new valve seals on and check the springs a lot easier, since they have the tools in house
other than that it looks ok just re ring it i have a almost complete "made in japan" gasket kit on ebay now cheap cause it was the wrong year on my 83 , stick some rags in the piston/rod area and clean all that crap off the stud area,also follow the directions on the PISTON RING END GAP POSITIONS" this is very important when you assemble it ok the openings are spaced 45 degrees apart or so, check your manual

[kevmalvarez]

Ok, I'm gonna carefully clean everything now and then work on trying to find parts. So right now I'm planning on replacing:
-gasket between cam and head
-head gasket
-base gasket
-piston rings
-the various o-rings

In addition I'm gonna look into getting my valves checked by a shop. Anything else you guys can think of? I know I'm lookin at a couple hundred bucks but I wanna get everything done while its torn down. Thank you all SO much for your input and advice. Hopefully I'm learning enough so I can help others who have similar problems

[49er]

You were posting about the fuel contaminated oil while I was posting, so I never read it until now. That is the cause of your oil burning problem alright.

Just make sure that you check the head and the cylinder surfaces for warps. You may need to have them machined true. There has been a lot of crap passing through that head/cylinder gasket joint for some reason.

[Homie]

Hmmmm? Now that you pulled the cylinder block off your project just got a lot bigger, more time consuming and a lot more expen$ive! Not having a lot of experience "inside" the engine I would have put it back together as described in my previous post and seen how it ran. If it didn't work out, you always could have taken it apart again and dived in a little deeper. But now that you're "in", go slow and take your time checking and completing each step of the rebuild. It's real easy to screw something up by getting in a rush - I know 'cause I've been there and done that myself. Good luck and give a shout out if you get stuck.