First, wanted to say thanks to all the good stuff here. With the service manual, searching the forums, a few cuss words and beer, I was able to remove my first head ever! Talk about a newbie!


What I'm not good at is diagnosing what may have gone wrong to cause a leak in the first place. Enquiring minds want to know.

Here's some history, I adopted a 91 vette that I believe to be all original with 98k miles. One day, I noticed heavy white smoke out the exhaust, then it goes away. A few days later, it's hard to start, just won't turn over. Then a few days later, the dreaded low coolant light. There is and never has been any coolant in the oil. I suspected hydrolock for the hard starts. So one morning when it would not turn over, I opened the hood and started removing the plugs. Sure enough, when I get to cylinder 7 (driver side firewall), coolant streams out.

Today I finally got the head off and I've taken some pics. I was hoping some of you could examine the pics and hopefully tell me what may have gone wrong to cause coolant to get into the cylinder.

Pic of cylinder #7

Pic of cylinder head #7

See how nice and clean cylinder 7 is? Nothing like water injection.

My best guess is it looks like gasket material blockage in the water jacket on the cylinder head. This may have caused a hot spot warping the head or the gasket. That would also make sense why I only saw water in the cylinder. Those head bolts are at the bottom of the head, away from most of the oil.

Please any thoughts would be appreciated.