Today at Atelier Kaz - ex-Honda R&D, F1, Indy/CART engineer

Possibly the block was not washed thoroughly back at the factory as
I found tiny white sand like objects in one of the head bolt thread.




If I have the industrial clean air room, I would love to remove the piston,
inspect and clean it and replace piston rings if there is any scratch markings.




Checked the valve seating on the front bank as well.



Carefully removed some of the solid carbon from the head.
After removing the remaining gasket using my trusted ceramic scraper,
ran the oil stone gently through the surface.






The moment of truth.
My super-duper high accuracy expensive IB shape straight edge.

The warp tolerance is only 0.05mm without reconditioning the surface and
because the thickness (feeler) gauge has some width, I prefer first checking the
tiny gap using the strong LED light from behind the straight edge.

Then, use the gauge for final confirmation.
Good news.
Both heads were flat and no need to send it off to the engineering company.
The rear one was simply just flat with even no spot gap.
At the front, there was a spot gap around #4 cyl as expected but it was
well within the spec so the composite gasket will do the job.






Now I’m stuck with cleaning all these black sticky gunk on the front head.
It’s the same story with the rocker arms at the front.
The gunk managed to pass through the paper thin gap between each arms so
I was quite surprised that none of the primary and secondary ones moved
when I pressed on the middle one during the check process before removal.

It would have been much easier if I can remove the valves and just
soak the cyl head in the special cleaning fluid.
Or, just send the head to the engineering company and let them do the
cleaning.......

I want to do something different rather than cleaning the parts forever.....


Hope to start the assembly process soon as I normally leave the cyl head
over night after tightening the head bolts and then double check the
head bolt torque again the following day.
During this process, I can’t install anything on the head.

Then, once I start the re-assembly, I'll be fighting with the smell of that
assembly paste.... I need to use extra amount this time.....

More to follow later if I finish the cleaning process.......


Kaz