Hello, I am wondering what the symptoms of a failing head gasket are. I know that if you have coolant in your oil, or oil in your coolant that is a sign that it has already failed. Can a compression check tell you anything, or are there too many causes of low compression in a cylinder to nail it down to the head gasket? I ask this out of curiosity because I have a '91 Civic Si with 136k miles that I have owned for around 14 months. During the summer I did all sorts of work on the car and cleaned up the area by the transmission, where the head meets the block, by the D16A6 stamp. Now that it has been cleaned I can tell there is some minor seepage from where the head meets the block. It may also be important to note that the timing belt that was on the car when I bought it was off by a tooth, and after a while (10k miles) caused my engine to ping or knock ( I can't separate the two in my head). Currently I think the engine is running really well. I love this car and plan on keeping the vehicle as long as I can until its financial death. Changing the head gasket is something I would feel comfortable doing mylsef (have a machine shop check/machine the head) and was wondering if it could be good preventative maintenance with the mileage I have. Thanks for any input, Mark