Head gasket q's

[PKRWUD]

***FOOTNOTE***

Hmmm. This whole thing got me thinking today. This week I finished buttoning up our Sprint car engine. The machine shop decked the block too much, and we needed a .066" thick head gasket to maintain safe tolerances between the valves and the pistons. Jim, the owner, picked up some copper gaskets that were the correct thickness, because no one else had a set that would work. Well, I started thinking today, and decided that .066" is way too much space to have unreinforced copper in an alcohol injected engine with 14:1 pistons. I called my head superguy, and asked him, and he said that we would loose the gasket within two weeks. He said it MUST be reinforced with a STEEL ring. Anything else would simply not do. He knows full well that we are running aluminum heads, and when I asked him about the two metals creating a problem, he said there would be none. He then pretty much said what I did last night, which was the only way there could be a problem is if the two metals were under water, and if that were the case, the engine wouldn't be running anyway. Alsao, even then, it would take time before a problem arose. I trust this guy with $10,000 heads, so I think you can trust his judgement too.

Take care,
-Chris