Head gasket gone?

[tomski]

righto head is off (took me a while due to work), bit of crappy water in the water box...cant find a machine shop around where i am (south london) but wil keep looking...also ordered a gasket kit which is coming tomorrow...so as soon as i machine it will start putting it together...learnt loads so far anyway :)

[BruKen]

Smear a thin layer of blue dye on the mating face and place on sheet glass. That'll tell you quick enough if you are wasting your time and money. Warped heads are rarer these days of modern metallurgy. You'd have to have really abused the engine... overheated ... to get it to warp. More likely a poor gasket, incorrectly torqued down head combo imho.

[rybes]

if you want to check if the heads flat, get yaself a flat piece of steel and put it corner to popposin corner then see if you can get a feeler gauage under it. do this to both corners and see what ya get. then do it acroos the head length ways then width ways. if you can get a feeler gauage under the steel itll need machinin. if you can find one long enough a stainless steel engineers ruler would be ideal:D

[tomski]

Hi all, just a bit of an update, so what happened was the following...when the head was off the first time (previous owner's mechanic apparently) I think one of the head bolts (no 8 to be exact) was either stretched or somehow crapped itself as on the first torque tightening it snapped on me...so got to buy another head gasket and new bolts...

The other thing I found is that when lifting the liners I could not find any evidence of previoius sealant....so assuming that the previous chap didnt seal them for some reason....

All in all I'm guessing those two reasons were why I had to change the head gasket again...almost gave up and was going to fix and sell the bike but faith restored now somewhat hearing it running again....with any luck thats the last bit of major work for a while as I do love the bike especially since I got some lowered pegs from Mustang (which are awesome by the way) the bike fits me like an old glove :)