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Water conducts heat 13 times better than air. This may be because of poor maintenance, or more likely to be because of a coolant leak. The most common cause of engine overheating is a low coolant level. Once a head gasket has failed it can cause all manner of problems, including: 1. When the engine gets too hot, the cylinder head expands (thermal expansion), which can crush the head gasket and cause failure. The most common cause of a blown head gasket is engine overheating. This is why you must always tighten to the head bolts to the required torque settings too tight and the gasket will be crushed too much to form a proper seal, too loose and it won’t seal enough. These are actually crushed when the cylinder head is tightened onto the engine block to provide a seal capable of dealing with the high temperatures and pressures involved. In order to form a good seal around the top of the cylinder, the head gasket features steel rings, known as fire rings. Without a good seal between the cylinder head and the cylinder, when the piston rises on the compression stroke some of the air/fuel mixture will be able to escape, resulting in a loss of compression. On top of the cylinder you have the cylinder head, which allows the fuel/air mixture to enter, and the exhaust gases to leave via inlet and exhaust valves.
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Inside an engine you have a piston going up and down within a cylinder. It also needs to do the same with the waterways, so that coolant can also circulate freely around the engine.īut what makes a head gasket different from any other gasket is that it also needs to seal the cylinder to prevent the engine losing compression. How does a car head gasket work?Ī head gasket needs to seal the oilways between the cylinder head and block, so that oil can freely circulate around the entire engine. This makes it the most stressed gasket in an engine, and therefore one of the most likely to fail. This means, unlike any other gasket in an engine, the head gasket has to seal oil, coolant, and compression from the cylinders simultaneously. Its job is to seal the two mating surfaces of the top and bottom halves of the engine. A head gasket is the gasket that sits between the cylinder head and the block.