Recently blown the head gasket on my 96 wrx. Booooooo............
Not happy, but am completely lost with pricing from different companies offering from £800 to £1500 for repair. Only got 53,300 on the clock. Is it worth having the job done or is a new/re-con engine the way ahead?

grateful for any advice. cheers

 

reason for higher cost is cos there pricing for rebuilding the engine and replacing the crank bearings. you could get away with not doing that but you risk two weeks down the line them failing and needing to replace head gasket again and rebuild engine.

 

Crank and bearings have nowt to do with the cost of replacing the head gaskets. Its labor intensive to pull the motor remove and skim heads along with new gaskets etc etc, the cost will vary from place to place but the bottom is left as is unless something else is wrong.

There should be no reason to consider replacing the block based on that.

 

also worth noting that in many cases the bottom end has to be completely stripped to allow skimming of the block.

 

I was a bit lucky maybe when one of my gaskets failed, but had all the usual signs of failure, and ran the engine for 6 weeks and some racing too.

I took the engine out of the car and stripped all the bits off and took the long engine to API who opened the engine us while i watched Took all of 10 mins for them to do that.
The one gasket was badly 'holed' and the other on its way, but the block and head faces were fine on the rebuild. API pressure checked for cracks etc and all was well. Took the engine back, built it back up and was racing again 2 weeks later.

That was 3 years and 9K miles ago with a lot of hillclimbs inbetween @ 1.5 / 1.6 bar and everything is running perfectly.
The bill was about £500 including new ARP head studs.

Car is an Sti V3 @ about 350 bhp.

 

£500 for 10 mins work?

 

A bargain I thought Paul!

 

Perfectly correct, Tidgy.

I know of a number fo cars where a 'specilaist ' has replaced just the head gaskets and the car has suffered a bottom end failure way too soon after.

My advice would be to do the bottom end as a precaution whilst it is out.

David APi

PS Paul, not quite 10 mins work for 911 !! We did:

2 x STi vers 4 head gaskets £90.00
Head stud set £130.00
Cam and crank seals £41.00
Pressure test heads £60.00
Labour £100.00
VAT £73.68
Total £494.67 give or take a bit.

 

And it is ALL solid as a rock too. Be a shame to split the engine in the future.
Graham.

 

IMHO -
If the head gasket(s) has failed on one of the oilways and not on the fire ring,
then i would strip the engine to remove all traces of emulsified oil in the block oilways,heads,modine,turbo etc and check the big ends and mains for damage from the water contaminated oil.

 

Sorry I miss read part of the second post, I thought Tidgy was referring to crank replacement and bearings ect as in an engine rebuild based the above information of a failed head gasket in that price.

As I pointed out in my “original post” the block would only have to be split if something else was wrong and warranted this as you have all said. You cant say you have to spilt every block which comes in for head gasket failure to have the deck skimmed etc as its not the case, Its going to come down to many factors. This is why I said it didn’t warrant buying another block until more was known about this or the motor was split.

Just to add there have been hundreds of cars come through here over the years for head gasket failures all different makes and configurations few have needed to be stripped to the bone and none have returned with head gasket failures or blown bottom ends.

Anyway I’m sure we have all seen cars from various specialists that sometimes haven’t gone to plan.





.

 

My block was left alone when David did the heads for me as I needed a quick job done between races, and that original block is still there 3 years later going like hell.
I do not use fancy oil and I do remove the crank sensor (not plugs) to crank the motor over to prime the system after an oil change once a year.
(Shell Helix oil, Sti oil filter)

 

I know someone else with a blown head gasket (probably not that uncommon in itself); its also a 96 WRX. Is it a UK and JDM model? Do you live in Wales?

 

............................................:wonde r: