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| Re: BEWARE OF MONOTORQUE HEAD GASKETS!!! |
Subject: Re: BEWARE OF MONOTORQUE HEAD GASKETS!!!
by jmac on 2011/11/15 10:07:29
It might handle that temp fine without mechanically seizing or blowing the head gasket (as DD says, if the cap held pressure and it therefore didn't allow steam pocket formation etc).
BUT - and this is a 'maybe' - presumably it is running a comp ratio/timing/cam duration (even if the cam was stock, there's still a max timing/cr you could run, so I'm trying to cover all bases here by saying that) that is closer to the detonation/pre-ignition threshold than a lot of street driven motors might be.
That would then be, relatively speaking, more sensitive to a rise in coolant temp above whatever it was tuned/setup to run at in race trim.
If the gasket is blown bad enough to affect the idle massively, it is at least likely you'll see bubbling in the radiator at idle (or whatever revs you can keep it going at) with the cap off. Sometimes they can just blow between cylinders and that won't see any coolant loss/contamination. Same deal with water in oil and or oil in water.
It's probably worth the time to pull the head and get it checked out if the usual tests (as mentioned in this thread) show nothing up.
It totally depends on the type of racing and so forth, but on a couple of mates cars, they've deliberately run stock head gaskets instead of copper ones, on the theory that they are fine to cope with normal pressures/usages, and will only blow (acting like a fuse of some sort) with abnormal combustion - too hot, detonation, preignition etc. Sure it meant they were replacing the gaskets every few race meets (this was entry level speedway racing, so whilst the combinations were pretty tightly regulated and modest, the amount of punishment the engines had to take was still higher than moat people could likely ever put them through on the street)
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