Head Gasket Replacement
 

Hello guys,

after I introduced myself, here is my first thread :) As some of you may already know, I changed the head gaskets and the Intake Manifold Gaskets toghether with a good friend. Unfortunately the engine wont start anymore. Now my question:

Do the head gaskets do have a upper and a lower side? On the gaskets itself we did not see a "this side up" writing or similar. I ordered the FEL-PRO HST9071PT Kit for this. The only difference between upper and lower side is that on the one side are the Fel-Pro Logos and on the other side there is no writing. Could it be that we embedded the gaskets upside down? For us it did not make a difference but that dont has to mean anything.

Logo does up. Head gaskets only fit one way. You may of blocked off an oil passage or a water passage. It should still start though. I do know that the intake and exhaust push rods are different lengths and if those are installed incorrectly that it will cause issues and engine damage.

Shit, that means we did it wrong :( The push rods should be fine. We really took care of that point cause I wanted to avoid killing the engine during the first start.

That means we have to do all the work again anyway cause the head gaskets are installed upside down. Why dont they mark the upper side and the lower side?

Well, at least there is no chance to mix up the gaskets, cause they are definetly the same.

At the moment we are checking the compression again. The compression tool shows no compression on Cylinder 2,4 and 6. Next up we will test Cylinder 1,3 and 5.

What we noticed: Now the engine seems at least to try to build up some compression. It is not cranking as if there is no resistance. We loosened the rocker arms a bit and now it seems to be a bit better.

Any ideas on that issue?

Update: We now tested Cylinder 1,3 and 5 and all of them have around 10 bar or 145 psi. What could cause this?

This whole thing is becoming weird! We realized that the front cylinder bank has no compression at all. Now we checked the Head gasket on the front bank and realized that inserted the gasket in the right way! We decided to put everything together and tested the compression again. Now its getting really weird. The compression on the other cylinder bank is also gone. Fact: We didnt even touched the oher cylinder bank :(

please describe the process that you are checking compression. and also what kind of shape is your tool in? starting to get a bit suspicious.

The tool is nearly brand new. Bought it mid of this year and only used it 3 times since then. We mount the tool into one of the spark plug holes and then try to "start" the engine.

What needs to be mounted on the engine to have a reliable compression test? As we started the engine was mounted completely and in the end we tested it just with the heads and the Rocker arms/pushrods mounted.

My Alero is finally running again! It seems that we had to crank the engine several times for about 40 seconds. The compression came back after that. Now he has 10bars on every cylinder and it runs. After the first start he was running pretty bad until we realised that we mixed up the spark plug wires of cylinder 2 and 6 :D After we plugged them in right, the engine was running perfectly smooth! Glad to have my car back on the streets :)

Thanks to all here for the tips. May this thread will help someone else in the future who has a similar issues with the LIM Gasket/Head gasket problem.

good to her, she's purring again.
As I already said on the german forum :)

Again, apologizes that I couldn't make it last WE.

Dont worry, in the end it went out right :) At least we didnt made a mistake at all, we just have been to unpatient :D

I still dont know why we had to crank the engine so long but as long as it works I wont ask ;)

When we do heads on a 5.3, the lifters expand with valve train removed. Result is no compression for a while

That could be the reason! As far as I know the most guys who do this job dont remove the rocker arms.