I had taken my truck into the delarship to have my head gaskets changed last week. Today I get the call, my heads are no good. The mechanic said that the fire rings have worn into my heads and that he didnt think new gaskets would seal. New heads are around $800 a piece!

Does this happen often?

Is this something that SoCalDiesel's stage 1 process can fix or are my heads officially junk? I'm gong to try and make the trip (45 miles) tomorrow to see for myself. I have to drop some things off and pick some others up anyway. Maybe I'll get some pictures tomorrow and some REAL ADVICE from here.

They can be decked by a competent machine shop to clean that up.

:rolleyes: Even with the driving, I could have been home by now, huh? Thanks a lot Eric, I appreciate it! I'll see what I can get done.

I had taken my truck into the delarship to have my head gaskets changed last week. Today I get the call, my heads are no good. The mechanic said that the fire rings have worn into my heads and that he didnt think new gaskets would seal. New heads are around $800 a piece!

Does this happen often?

Is this something that SoCalDiesel's stage 1 process can fix or are my heads officially junk? I'm gong to try and make the trip (45 miles) tomorrow to see for myself. I have to drop some things off and pick some others up anyway. Maybe I'll get some pictures tomorrow and some REAL ADVICE from here. Chaffing from the fire rings on the Dmax heads should be minimal, Maxtech is correct, depending on the encroachment depth, milling should clean up even moderate indention's.

I've even seen that on cast iron heads.... Probably looks worse than it really is and won't take much to clean it up...

Thats what I was thinking. I'll get some pictures this afternoon and see what you guys think. Hell, this is the first time the heads have been off, and it only has about 130K miles on the thing, I wouldnt think it would be that bad. Thanks again guys, I'll get pics up ASAP.

They can be decked by a competent machine shop to clean that up.

Make sure they check the hardness. My concern is whether or not it is normal wear and tear or has the engine been overheated and caused the castings to go soft.

They are probably ok, just good practice to check the hardness.

Trip, I sent you guys (SoCalDiesel) an email about this--looking at the heads.

The truck has NEVER been hot since I've had it (100K). I got the tranny pretty hot about a year ago (and its long gone now) but never the motor---that I know of. With the blown gasket, my engine temp has actually ran COOLER (15-20 deg or so). The main thing I noticed is that it took longer to even get the temp needle to start coming up after a cold startup (5-10 miles).

Sometimes they take longer to come up to temp because the sending unit is not covered in water due to low coolant level, then once the sending unit gets wet the temp shoots up very quickly.

Here's some pics if anyone's interested. The grooves didnt "feel" that bad to me, but I'll let Guy decide how bad they are when they get there.
On the one head, my valves had some pretty good crud on them. Is that normal after a teardown?
http://www.dropshots.com/day.php?userid=61254&cdate=20070116
I would post the pictures on here, but I cant figure out how.

The temps never rose fast or ever spiked up and down like others I have heard of doing.

Those pics look pretty normal to me. I dont see anything out of the ordinary with them. There is a spot on the heads for sure, I've had good success cleaning that up with a deck job, I've also reused heads that looked that way with no trouble.

Trippin brings up a good point on the hardness too