Originally Posted by
rangcrx
in my ten years i have NEVER seen a honda head warp i even drove a crx 17 miles with no water the temp gag brakeing off passed red"a joke" and even let it idle for like 45mins till the car just died that head still did not warp..its very uncommen...i bet your heater hose came off or split
If you are removing the head, check it for warpage. With the exception of hydrolocking or other certain high cylinder pressure conditions, three layer metal head gaskets don't blow when the head/block mating surfaces are near perfectly flat and good head bolts are torqued to spec - unless the engine was superheated. Also check the block's deck surface. Both have service limit specs listed in your Honda repair manual.
Part of the dynamic of a blown gasket and aluminum warpage is water, part of which when superheated in a car engine flashes to steam, the other part remaining liquid, which can never be hotter than 212 degrees (a bit higher with coolant added).
The cool, liquid water is in the block and the steam, as hot as 1500 degrees, is rising/expanding to the head superheating the aluminum there. These two great temperature differences meet between the block and head, causing warpage along that surface. Avoiding these two greatly different temps between the water and superheated metal is why we don't dump cool water in a hot engine. But remember, it is all relative. 250 degree coolant is cool water when you consider the head is superheated by much hotter steam and combustion.
As counter intuitive as it may seem, rangcrx's experience is not surprising. He had no water and thus no conditions for vastly different temperatures within the engine. Running an engine without water causes it to get very hot, for sure, but without cooler (liquid) water from the block to spash up against the hot head causing rapid contractions of the metal, running the way rang did is nothing more than like putting the engine in an oven and heating it up. It isn't going to warp it, it's just going to get hot. It also won't warp as it cools, as long as it is allowed to cool at a slow rate, which I am sure it did after the 45-minute idle and when it eventually stopped running and slowly cooled to the ambient temperature. It was a controlled, slow cooling.
Water is your engine's friend when it is stabilizing temperatures. But divide it into cool liquid and super hot steam, and the two work against each other but by putting the metal in a tizzy.