Cylinder Wall Scoring?

[Amos830]

Pulled the head off my 85 M30B34 yesterday as I was getting some coolant seepage into cylinder 1. I did have great compression before the head gasket went and pulled the car off the road as soon as I smelt the sweet smell of defeat from the tail pipe.

I purchased the engine used with unknown mileage. Though given the km on the car we pulled it from it seems safe to guess that its around 200,000 km old.

Anyway this is what I saw. It looks worse in the picture than it does with my eye and it's not stopping my finger nail though I can feel it.

It's not so much the vertical line that I can feel but more so the line that looks like a mound.

I can't seem to find other pictures online of marks like this. What do you think would cause this?



And from a different angle.

[Mike W.]

It's really hard to say from here, but it kind of looks like there was fluid, probably water or coolant, in there. It's of course a canted engine and look at it picturing water in there, the pattern is what it would look like. I don't see real damage, but even with good pictures, and yours are, than you!!! I can't really say what to do or not do from the pictures. It's one of those things to me where you have to be there.

[Amos830]

Liquid, of course! Mike I'm so glad you responded. You've always been one of the guys that's really helped me during my e28 ownership. Thank-you.

A couple years ago I was too scared to remove a valve cover now I'm doing head gaskets and rebuilding heads. Mye28 has been there the entire way.

Now that I'm looking at it with liquid in mind, I'm thinking that it was probably coolant. I can't imagine there would be that much gas built up in one cylinder. I was having fuel pressure drops before I rebuild the injectors so maybe it was fuel.

Once I get it back together I'll do a compression test to see if those marks caused any measurable compression loss. I've got a b35 on a stand that's being built for a turbo and throwing on a new head gasket on this b34 was cheaper than a tow job to the shop.

Thanks again Mike.

[Kyle in NO]

Mike is probably correct. Fix the gasket and roll with it!