Was running against this car, and just before I let out the engine feels like it sort of gave up. Starts running real rough, and the check engine light is blinking at me. Tried to pull codes in hp tuners but nothing came up. I limped it to a friends house a few miles away, and crawled underneath to find coolant dripping down the side of the block from the head. I'm assuming I blew a head gasket. Exhaust didn't really smell sweet like it was burning coolant though. Opinions..?

 

Man that sucks. I was wondering where you went. At least you beat that Evo

 

I bet you're right... my dad and I suck water into our engines via a vacuum line to clean everything, the whole time it obviously runs like ****, and the SES light will flash, but throw no codes... and I think my dad had similar results when his HG went at 200k.

 

Lifted a head and blew the gasket.

 

Well that's a bit of a relief, thanks guys. That head does have a shittier head gasket as well. When I was chasing down lifter tick I replaced lifters on that side and put a felpro gasket on, while the other side has MLS. Needless to say, I will be switching it back to MLS.

It was also causing fluctuations from rich to lean at cruise, like 12s sometimes and then 16s. I got it back to a friends house and shut it down.

 

a blinking CEL always means tons of misfire...in your case you had coolant in the cylinder.

great time to do head studs and ls9 gaskets...

 

Is the felpro gasket graphite?

 

Pretty sure you can get either in the FP gaskets, single layer or MLS.. Sounds like you def puked a gasket.. This was on 10psi??

 

The damn graphite gaskets cant tolerate the heat cycles between dissimilar metals.The expansion and contraction rates of the iron block and aluminum head grind them down to the point of blowing out.If you lift a head normally the coolant overflow will **** on the wheel well first.

 

Now I know! Yes, it was a graphite gasket.