Blown Head Gasket... ?

[Revhead]

Hi guys

The guy I sold my old 33 to a couple of years ago (a relative, hence this post and how I still get to see the car ) is having some trouble with it. It's a 93 (so series 1 obviously) GTS25t.

He was giving it some herbs during the week, when it suddenly stopped making boost (guage wouldn't go over zero) and blew truckloads of smoke. He immediately pulled over and ended up having it towed to my brother's place for some work. The turbo has been checked out and the workshop said that it was definitely stuffed courtesy of a blown oil seal - a bit of a bugger, but hey it's a nice simple fix, swap it out and go.

Now that the new turbo, fittings, manifold and pipework has arrived - he decided to go for something a bit more modern, lol - the old manifold has come away from the head to reveal that the ports for cyls 1 & 2 are absolutely coated in oil. The other 4 are fine. It looks like there may have been more than one thing go wrong.

So I'm just trying to bounce some ideas around... what could the problem be? Our first thoughts were head gasket (or the head itself), or possibly (but unlikely) rings, given that the affected cylinders are right next to each other. I'm struggling to think of any other possibilities as most of the ones I came up with would have spread the oil through all of the cylinders, not just two of them. The issue with that is that a compression test isn't going to be easy, as the oil has been dropped, and what's left in the galleries will probably spray everywhere as most of the exhaust side of the engine is missing; so we'd like some options before we start tearing the head off

Also, is it possible that the head gasket nuked itself and a bit of it (part of one of the metal rings perhaps) went through the turbo and killed the seal? Feasible?

FYI the engine has a lot of kays on it (I haven't checked what it has now, but 2 years ago I sold it with 204,000km...), to my knowledge has never been opened, and for a fair bit of its later life while it was in my hands, it was making around 300rwkw. I won't be the least bit surprised if it's started throwing in the towel.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions

Cheers

Marc

[Duncan]

well the problem is the most likely problem is rings/ringlands not the head gasket...the gasket is pretty reilable in these cars...

I'm not too familiar....can you do a leak down test without having to crank the engine?

[The Mafia]

sounds like ring lands to me.

Might have been pinging a bit.