10V head gaskets - who's to blame

[Tony Lum]

At 09:44 PM 7/30/02 , you wrote:
>Well, I said that I had bad experiences w/ 2 motors w/ blown gaskets, and
>now I know why it happened to the second one. I guess the PO must have had
>the head off for some reason, and someone put in the wrong gasket, b/c
>several of the cooling holes were blocked off by the gasket. It's a weird
>gasket cuz it fits, but on one end of the block,  there are almost no
>cooling passages in the gasket. What the heck kinda motor would fit w/
>that? Anyway, I bet the motor was only running for a little while like
>that, cuz the motor looks fine except for the cylinders leaking into each
>other due to the blown gasket. Thought I'd just let people know...I guess
>maybe the gaskets aren't the ones to blame sometimes.
>
>-ameer

There's extra water passages on the later hydraulic heads, probably for
cooling, so it sounds to me that the PO installed the head gasket for a
solid lifter motor.  My mechanic retrofitted a later hydraulic head to his
'83 5kT (originally solid lifters) and needed to weld up a water jacked in
the head before it could be used.

HTH,

-Tony
urq #900302