C36 Head Gasket

[215m3]

Head gasket is leaking near the back of the block and was spotted by MB at it's service today. Needs a new front seal as well. a couple of questions please as i've tried the search facility and found nothing.

1. How long does this roughly take to complete?

2. While the heads off and gets skimmed would it benefit getting gas flowed, along with the inlet manifold - had this done on my 16v corrado and made a noticeable difference. Would iw be noticeable on a C36 and has anyone had this work done before?

cheers in advance.

 

[Alps]

hiya, mines got a slight oil leek at the back too, but ive never had to top my oil up! and ive been told its a common thing on the c280 and c36 engines.

normally replace the gasket, skim the head and replace , you could gas flow and stuff, but the cost goes up alot, put a post up on club202 to see what responces you get

 

[jaymanek]

what exactly is a gas flow?

 

[guydewdney]

what exactly is a gas flow?

short answer - head taken to speacilaist who grinds away the bad bits on the inlet and exhaust tract to allow better air flow - usually very slight improvement on max power - but usually much improved midrange and smoothness.

bigger improvements found on cheaper cars adn high performance stuff where the last 0.1% is found by several hours of buggering about with this sort of thing.

how often do you use FULL power at FULL throttle - I know I dont - so I dont care

guy

 

[Sp!ke]

what exactly is a gas flow?

Very basically, gas flowing is smoothing out all the ports so as to allow for maximum unrestricted transferral of fuel mixture into the head through the inlet valves/ports and out again throught the exhaust ports. A bit like aerodynamics but actually thermodynamics.

Guy> Actually, significant improvments can be found by doing this. Even high performance engines are built to a budget and can always be improved upon. The really top tuners can usually gain about 30% in HP purely from Valve work and porting alone.

 

[Chris C36]

I have got the head off mine at the moment as the head gasket is leaking from the back of cylinder 6. It is quite common on these. The job time for this according to a couple of books is about 9 1/2 hours, which is Merc terms would be £1,000 including VAT (this price excludes getting the head crack tested as well!!!). The gasket on mine was only leaking and hence very little need to skim the head, the ports also seem pretty smooth so I recon gas flowing the head would have limited benefit. I suppose it depends how much it is going to cost you.