spent all day yesterday swapping the head gasket on the civic. ugh. utterly non-trivial. it's been a while since i've done that job on any car and you forget... i have to say, the civic is a royal pita. it's not just the picky stuff like the hard-to-get-at hoses, the hidden mounting brackets, etc., it's the clean-up. the gasket is well and truly welded to the head and the block, so clean-up takes ages. the problem is, because of the relatively soft alloy, you can't just use a chisel on the old gasket material, so i ended up having to shave it off. it took about 3.5 hours for that part alone, 7 hours total. in the end, both the head and the block were as clean and as non-damaged as i could make them, and so far, all appears well in terms of gas-tightness, but here's my thought for the group: it's impossible to make a "clean" job of this work. as you scrape, old head material gets into the cylinders, the water jacket, everywhere. and even with cleaning the engine well beforehand, grit still hides out and gets everywhere too. now, having cleaned up, test driven, changed the oil, etc., i look in the oil filler hole and sure enough, there's grit scratching on the cam lobes. i hate to imagine what the oil pump looks like. the only way you could ever do this work "successfully" is have access to semi-surgical cleaning facilities, and a whole bunch of time. i therefore don't expect this engine to last anywhere near as long as it otherwise would have - with such contamination, wear will be greatly accelerated. in the future, excessive though it may sound at first sight, i'll not bother changing gaskets on an older honda again - i'll just go straight to the low mileage jdm engine. it'll be quicker and at about 0 for my D15, it'll be a good deal more economic.
