Headgasket and Belt/Waterpump Project
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update 1
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Got the car up on the stands and put on my fancy cover to protect the front end. Who needs those expensive leather things when you can just tape on a cut up picnic table cloth?
Oh yeah, look at that dirty engine bay.
Apparently I need to clean my air filter. Note the dead bee (circled in red)
So many coolant hoses!
At this point the hood has fallen onto my head several times, so I get fed up with the failing hood shocks and create a hood prop.
As I'm pulling out the intake one of the allen head bolts strips out on me, so I end up having to drill the head off.
The remains of the bolt's head.
Ooooo, valves.
As well as dirt.
At last I get down to the belts.
Only to find out that one of the PO's hacked up the rear belt cover for some reason.
Part way through this process I move the power steering pump fluid resevoir, only to come back the next day to find that it has leaked all the fluid out down the radiator fans. Luckily that pile of cat litter was where it was...
Apparently the shop where I did the pre-purchase inspection wasn't lying about the power steering leaking...
I get the old waterpump off and clean all the old gaskets off. It looks all shiney now.
Removing the wp allowed me to see the mess the oil pump has left.
I start working on assembling the new wp, only to find out that the casting is flawed and the smaller thermostat won't sit flush.
So I go in with the dremel to grind stuff down so it'll fit. (note all the shavings on the right - good thing I put that paper towel in there to catch them)
While I'm in there with the dremel I also smoothed down some other rough looking spots.
But I finally got it all assembled and looking pretty.
The new gasket for the wp.
The waterpump back on as well as all the pulleys.
In the process of doing the rollers I ended up with an extra, so if anyone needs one of these I've got one.
The growing pile of parts under the car.
I got a little too excited with ripping the old vacuum lines out and broke one of the tabs off the icv. Guess I'll have to do a mbc now.
After getting this far I decided to finally get the head off.
I wonder how long it will take for the oily handprints to burn off the headers?
20 years of carbon deposits on the cylinders.
Unfortunatly in the process of reinstalling the waterpump I stripped three studs and three bolts, so I decided it probably would be better to fix that now than later, so I pulled it all back apart. Ended up having to helicoil the bolt holes (red arrows) and rethreading the studs (blue arrows). Hopefully the studs will hold...
Since I had the wp off again, I went to town on all the oil and dirt with an entire can of sprayable brake cleaner. Much better.
I finally manage to get the rest of the exhaust stuff out after this, but don't have any pictures of that process. Lets just say it was a pita. Here's what the car looks like now with the parts pile.
And then some closeups of the head/headgasket. Nothing visibly wrong on the top.
Nor the bottom...
I noticed these wierd marks, but realized that if there had been any blowthrough it was just between two coolant passages, so that couldn't have meant anything for the low compression number.
And closeups of the head. The only thing visibly different between the different cylinders is the one that had the bad compression number doesn't have the peeling look on the intake valve like the other three cylinders do. No idea what that means though.
No noticable valves sitting up high either... (the bad cylinder is the one by the large coolant passage sticking off the head)
Update 1
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So after posting all up to this point on rennlist, the peeps pointed out that the thermostat housing I had on the waterpump was made for the 944's, and that the 951's had a different plastic housing that wasn't blocked off. I could either wait for the correct one in the mail or could drill mine out - I didn't want to deal with waiting for one in the mail, so I just drilled mine out. Ended up that a 25/64" drill bit fit perfectly.
The old thermostat housing to compare if it was blocked off or open (rennlist had said that the blocked ones were white, not-blocked ones are black, so I wasn't sure if it was blocked or not since it was arguably a white piece when it was new)
Sure enough it wasn't blocked, but the new one was, so I proceeded to drill it out.
About this point I decided to take some pics of the general condition of the car.
The engine bay is rather empty looking, if not still dirty.
I have all the electrical wires pulled up onto the cc unit housing.
And all the vacuum lines hanging off the driver side, ready to be replaced by new ones upon reassembly.
I decided to look at the rest of the exhaust and see if there was anything noticable that might be the cause of my shifting issues with reverse, but to get under the back of the car I had to pull the pile of parts out. They've sort of migrated and taken over the rest of the garage, much to the dismay of my parents.
Otherwise I have been spending most of my recent time on interior stuff - I've been doing wiring to move the window switches to the center console, and will start putting in the new speakers tomorrow. I'll make a seperate webpage thing about those tasks once I get enough pics.