Head Removal

[Land Rover Joe]

So here is what things looked like when taking all the covers and everything off. Heads are on and you can clearly see the twin overhead cams with the variators and timing chains. The golden color is from the oil on the aluminum but nothing to worry about.

 

[Land Rover Joe]

And this is the state of affairs after pulling the heads off and taking a look at both sides - one shows the valves and springs and the other shows the interior of the piston facing valves. You can see the carbon build up in the piston heads here and the difference between the intake and exhaust valves. Not bad but something I wanted cleaned up and checked. We had to send out to a shop for the inspection / gauging.

 

[Land Rover Joe]

This is one of the head gaskets; no issues with it but you can see the wear. I bought the Atlantic British kit which comes with Elring gaskets - steel ones - which are excellent and we had no issues installing (let's see if there are any leaks when we get this thing going...!)

One note is that despite attempting to fix an earlier oil cooler gasket leak last summer with some sealant, the gasket had failed and leaked even worse than before...which had oil running down the back side of the engine (and me terrified that we had a leak on the back side where the flywheel seal and flex plate is...something I really don't want to do and I don't think one can do body-on).

 

[Land Rover Joe]

Pulling out the valves for cleaning...we had to improvise since I didn't have the correct valve spring compression tool (yikes!)

 

[Land Rover Joe]

What the spring and valve look like; note the oil and paint on the spring (not corrosion!).

 

[Land Rover Joe]

And don't loose any bits and bobs!
What the valve spring and the keeper and seal and little keeper pieces look like...

 

[Land Rover Joe]

What the head looks like as the tear-down continues - you can see the valve seals there (the Atlantic British kit comes with new valves seals and I highly recommend replacing all those for this job).

 

[Land Rover Joe]

The state of affairs after thoroughly cleaning everything and replacing everything in the heads while prepping for reinstallation.

 

[Land Rover Joe]

And this is where we are now (mid-February 2025): heads reinstalled on the engine and properly torqued to spec. We put new High Pressure Fuel Pumps on and are now waiting for these silly "oil restrictors" before putting the camshafts back in and tightening things up on top to begin resetting the timing and installing the timing chains and whatnot.

 

[greiswig]

Really helpful set of documentation, @Land Rover Joe . Thanks for taking the time to share.