Hello fellow brick lovers. I'm doing my first head gasket job and actually having a good time, but I have some questions. Mainly I don't want to take my head into a machine shop and seem like a total fool who is easily taken advantage of.

I have a full Elring Head Gasket Set and I find it frustrating that I can't find an itemized list of its contents. Are there seals or o-rings in there that I need to put in the head myself, and should I do that before it goes to the shop? For instance the front and rear camshaft seals, should I take those with me to the machine shop and have them install them? Is it normal for the shop to provide all the necessary parts required as part of the job? I want to have them do a valve job too, do they usually provide any needed parts there as well?

Are there things I should check for/do in the block since I am this deep into the engine?


Thanks,
Ryan

"I have a full Elring Head Gasket Set and I find it frustrating that I can't find an itemized list of its contents."

http://www.brickboard.com/RWD/index.htm?id=1589297&show_all=1

I did the work myself because when I walked into a machine shop, asked about the cost to resurface an aluminum head, I was told $120 Canadian. I was expecting around $50. I walked out. I had 2 heads to work on so figured I'd learn to DIY.

Also, http://www.brickboard.com/RWD/index.htm?id=1590640&show_all=1
--
1980 245 Canadian B21A with SU carb, M46 trans, 3:31 dif, in Brampton, Ont.

1. if the head gasket failed and your head was NOT blowing smoke before it failed FORGET about valve seals and guides, forget about adjusting the valves

2. bring it to a shop complete (leave cam in it) and tell them to measure the head for warpage paying special attention to the warpage in the middle of the head. they already ought to well know what to do anyway.

3. tell them to skim it as little as possible to give you a good new surface.

4. once thats done install your elring head gasket DRY and MAKE SURE there is NO fluid in any of the headbolt holes in the block. suck it out with paper towels or rags if there is.

5. torgue it down to spec in the proper tightening order.

6. install 4 new exhaust manifold gaskets and 1 new intake gasket and bolt them down

7. remove the thermostat and refill coolant into the block (after installing water pump) till it drips out. this presumes no hoses are disconnected

8. install new thermostat and gasket. finish adding coolant to over flow tank

9. hooks up what left like cam sprocket, adding new seals if needed, t belt correctly timed, etc etc

10 start car and off you go

Very Interesting read ...
http://www.pbase.com/stealthfti/goodaluminum

Especially here ...
http://www.pbase.com/stealthfti/image/25123315


"When this head was resurfaced, the camshaft was NOT removed and the journals were not checked. The journal warpage of 0.020in was NOT detected and corrected. The warped head was resurfaced while the camshaft was still in place stressing the head casting through it's bearing caps."

I'd like to find someone around where I live that could be as thorough as the author of the referenced site.


--
Happy Motoring! 92' and 93' 240's past cars "74 140, '75 140, '86 240, '87 240 wagon, '02 S60.

I am looking at having a head worked over, and this guy definitely knew the field he was playing on. And he explained it in clear concise terms.
thanks

I'm assuming you are speaking to me and if so thanks. I've done a lot of cylinder head rebuilding, and a bunch of them were Volvos. Every red block and a couple of B27's.

Hi Peter,

I think Paul may have been still referring to the mechanic in Hawaiian gardens area around Los Angeles but agree it is a tiny bit bit ambigious and that happens for lots of reasons.

He is in the middle of his own dilemma with an engine in another post at the moment. He has several symptoms going on, all at once, that disguise what has really happened before or after what?


I caught your post earlier and agreed with what you said about the warpage of a one piece casting.
That said, I'll give you a thumbs up from myself, a fellow older machinist of past.
I am NOT from the automotive side of the trade though. I have not repaired an engine head ever but feel I could meet the challenge on my own engines.

I have never straighten a shaft by using heat and cooling with water but I believe with enough practice and using the theory behind it it will work. What you said about a good machinist or mechanic can achieve many things. In both cases you just don't walk right up to it and it happens though. Heat requires caution with materials involving alloys in steel or aluminum.
I have worked mostly with steel and treat it like it was rubber when clamping as you can induce stress easily with bolt pressure. I shim under each clamp and tighten with dial indicators on the workpiece.

I won't ask you how as I can visualize your setup.

You talked about pushing the cam in a lathe with your thumb. Guessing how big your thumb is and getting several thousandths raised my eyebrows for a second. I just thought about how posts go and wrote it off. It's just the like other post, the devil is in the "missed" details as to what can be!

I can only surmise the age of a lathe and its running tolerances in the spindle. Then, the setup, if a roller bearing center was being used or center holes fitting correctly and deeply enough. I myself would use lay it in "V" block supports and expect I could never push as hard as all those valve springs. I am sure you had your reasons to check the cam for something that way just because you were curious if nothing else.

In my younger "hay" days, I worked making gear boxes that were as big our Volvo's and twice as high. I had to compensate for spindle droop on half shafts or run support bearings in the opposite side finished of bores to support the boring bar. I sat inside the bolted together box and ran the boring bar through it. Operating the machine from a pendulum control panel dropped down in a inspection cover.
On all other machining operations I rode the machine around one side the part at a time. Again you just don't get to walk up to jobs like that, you practice elsewhere!

Another added note that the steel boxes were all heat treated to around 1200 degrees for hours to be annealed. Depending on size or complexity they are shot peened or vibrated to relieve welded "in" structural stresses before and during machining.
I think with aluminum its only a few hundred degrees. The trick is learning how much stress to induce, to what unknown type of alloys and see what you get!

As far as reboring the cam journals it can be done. The journal caps have split lines that can be shaved to bring down new material. Indicate the two outer lower ends to sweep zero and go for it across the middle. Even a few thousandths low on the outer ends will not mean anything. There are all kinds of adjustments to compensate throughout an engine assembly.
Same thing goes can go for crankshafts in engine blocks as long as you do not push the pistons up to far but then there are ways around that as you probably have done.

Later in my life I taught students or apprentices basic machining practices. I tried to instill the idea that there is almost for sure two ways to do any job and come out with the same results. One maybe slower or more difficult but it can be done. If you think things out and plan your steps you won't make scrap. Mistakes are possible but so are solutions.

Keep friendly with welders, know how to sleeve, stub and repair things and if you make new stuff, expect some engineering changes anytime!

Time! Time for bed or "retire" some more! (:-)
Phil

I thought it ambiguous too. Thanks for that.
Chevy in-line six tossed a rod and the owner had a hotter cam in it, so I wanted to check the cam in case it took a hit I couldn't see. Set it up on a centre in the spindle, and in the tailstock. Indicated the centre bearing journal and found about .002 run-out. Worried about it for a bit until I pushed on the journal with my thumb and got .005. Longer cam for sure, but it moved easy.
I've never straightened a head, but I know folks locally that can do it. When I learned to TIG weld aluminum the trick was to take a hickory handled wire brush ( all of the brushes were stainless wire for aluminum ) and heat the aluminum until when rubbed the hickory handle would leave a faint brown smear on the surface. Then you could weld it without distortion or too much amperage.
You could align bore the cam bores like honing main bearings, but that's a pile of work. More than a head is worth. But I agree.
I appreciate you posting.
Peetz

Yes, I see that a six or eight in-line would be a lot longer than our engines with smaller bores.
Are racing cams hollow like crankshafts by any chance?

On the heads, I was thinking that a person might heat a head to about 350 degrees maximum. You would need to start lower as not to lose some hardness. It's got to stand up against the steel head-gasket rings. Think slow cooking and heat soak it over time would be my first time endeavor!
You might get our heads in a large home oven. I think it would be a push to do it at an angle with that fixture too! I would try it out on some older bad heads first.

Have you seen them do some and what they use to do one or many in their case?


Interesting, that you use the term honing those cam bores. Since I did my share of teaching over the years I have a tendency to slide into that mode very easily.

If you do not mind, I would like to clarify for others that honing enlarges a bore that is already there but it will not correct alignments except through sizing, that I know of?
I am sure there might be "two ways" to get it to work though!

A spring loaded stone hone cannot really make a bore more round but only bigger and provide a different finish. You probably use an adjustable fixed stone mandrel machine made specifically for certain diameters that will.

In my side of the trade we enlarge (bore) holes that are already there from drilling, punched, casted or torched into plate for example. Drilled holes if measured are actually triangles. Lobed, elongated holes if you measure them for roundness. Bored holes are only as true as the spindle turns within in its on bearing tolerances and cutting pressures from the tool itself.

To get around this inherit out of roundness discrepancy we use the honing process or a higher production two bladed cutting tool that floats in a bar and immediately follows a bored hole. In the trade it is called a "Muskegon" cutter.
Named after the name of the company/ inventor or area/town of one of "our" northern states. I want to say, Michigan or Wisconsin. It's been too long now to be quoting that stuff!

It removes the last few thousandths left after boring but will leave a about a 32-63 micro finish in one pass, to size repeatedly. It does this over several bores within ten hundredths of a thousandths end to end and very round. They have been around longer than I have!

Finer finishes still require a honing operation.
Now, they have extrusion honing by pushing an abrasive paste, under high pressure, through the bore or to the bottom and out. Even higher quality mirror like finishes are achieved.
That's a special machine thats been out about for thirty years now.
Started about the same time of "water jet abrasive" cutting and a ceramic type of Poly-crystalline cutting tools that are equal to diamond but "in theory"cheaper, got their start.

Their high production the parts that were harden and ground. An example is our front wheel bearing spindles.
They leave the parts oversized by about .010 on the journals. Later they get threaded and the journals areas turned, right to size. Actually turning time of about a minute or so, then!
CV joints would not be possible without CNC today.
Cars did not get cheaper but stayed affordable considering your perspective?

Geez, I am getting old but I am glad I missed most of the high production CNC machining as I would have gone nuts......uh...sooner! (:-)

It was Nice to have a chat with ya today!
Phil

There is some confusion around this journal alignment thing.
When the head warps it usually bows upwards in the middle. The cam remains straight. If the head is surfaced to remove twenty thou of warp, the gasket surface is machined back to flat. Clamp loads from the head bolts are fine, none of that changes. The cam bearing bores will still have the bow in them and installing the now flat head gasket surface insures that the cam bores will now always be bowed. The straight camshaft then runs in bores that are not concentric and the lower half of the centre bearings and the upper half of the end bearings will be tight. So the head will wear out when the cam has to bend to follow the bores.
The cure is to straighten the head before the surface is machined. That's done thermally in a jig that loads the head to bend it down again and holds it there while its heated. If the machinist is good the head returns to nearly flat and is then machined flat taking off maybe 4 or 5 thou instead of 20.
For sure the cam can't bend the head. It's the other way around. Put a cam in a lathe between centres and a dial indicator on the centre bearing. You can bend the cam several thou by pushing on it with your thumb. Ask me how I know.
The cam bores can only be corrected by straightening the head and they cannot be machined to align them.
The stock clearance on the cam bores is several thou. It's not that tight. Some misalignment can be tolerated. I don't know just how much, but probably close to 10 thou.
The cheap way of checking is to remove the buckets and valves, and then lay the cam in the lower half of the bearing bores. If it rocks up and down at the end, it's the head thats warped. A machinists straight edge can be used too without having to remove the valves.

Nice list.

I'll add two more potential items.

- Make a thread cleaning bolt for the head bolt holes. Take an old head bolt, cut some grooves down the sides with a Dremel cutting blade. Run that in and out of the hole a few times along with the vacuuming.

- New head bolts. I've heard the discussion go both ways about whether to reuse the head bolts or not, and if they are stretch to torque type... Me, I'd use new bolts. Not cheap, but I'd go that way since you're in that deep anyway.

And don't forget the bolt torque is to spec plus a 1/4 turn.

A mute point maybe now, but I'd go with an OEM gasket over Elring. The OEM is a hard waffle type material, where the Elring is softer. Just sayin'... They're different.

I searched everywhere for an OEM head gasket, but every place said they were discontinued. That's why I went with Elring.

Is this scored head bolt designed to remove dirt and metal shavings and sort of re-tap the threads? Not really sure what I am supposed to be trying to adhesive with that.

Hello,

Last summer I replaced the head gaskets on my two 93's. Neither one had overheated but both were found to have about 6 thousandths of warp, mostly between either two and three or three and four. They had been leaking coolant, not much however and a little engine oil for about 100k miles

I purchased a Volvo original gasket, and an Elring kit and found the two to be either identical or near identical, I couldn't tell. One went in green sedan, the other in red sedan. No problems since. I think the Elring is fine, as least based upon my meager experience.

My machinist said it is imperative to resurface the head. He's in his late 60's and has been preparing race engines for years and years. His shop looks like an operating room. He took care of installation of the hushers, valve seals and ground the valve stems down. We did absolutely nothing to the valves as he said they looked fine. He cautioned me to make sure I got the block cleaned of any gasket. One both blocks it appeared that during original gasket installation, Volvo used a spot tack material which took some effort to remove. Keep some tight fitting bits of rags in all the ports and don't lose any. A pair of hemostats is handy to fish any rags out of the holes after your block cleaning.

Good luck,

Marty Wolfson
Proud member of the 300K club x 2

"And don't forget the bolt torque is to spec plus a 1/4 turn."

How many ft-lbs did that work out to? Mine was about 80ft-lbs.
--
1980 245 Canadian B21A with SU carb, M46 trans, 3:31 dif, in Brampton, Ont.

The machine shop will disassemble the head, inspect and most likely remove 3 - 6 mils from the surface to make sure the head is flat. They will install new valve guide seals (in head gasket set) that you provide, or of course, install seals they get. This work also includes grinding valves and reassembly. This work is anywhere from 150 to 250 bucks depending on where you live, competition, etc. Anything above this work is extra, like installing seals, setting valve lash, etc. Hope this helps a bit.

if you live in the Los Angeles area I have a machine shop, in Hawaiian Gardens that is top notch. Was quoted $250 to rebuild a 240 head incl adjusting the valves