One Cylinder Head Dirty (Internally)

Hi all,

I picked up a used 4.7L 2UZfe engine from the wreckers with 150K. I noticed the driver's side valve cover bolts weren't torqued. After removing the valve covers for paint I see internally one really clean and shiny passenger side cylinder, and one dirty and dull driver's side cylinder (overall the colour is just darker and dull for all the components and looks similar to my old engine with 300k).

The dirty driver's side does show signs of failed spark plug tube gaskets with some build up of oily dirt around and below where the gaskets sit (two rear tubes).

Would the failed spark park tube gaskets cause the inside of the cylinder to look more aged as compared to the clean passenger side (where I don't see failed tube gaskets). Has anyone ever seen something similar before?

Kinda worried I have an engine with one old head bolted on but it seems so unlikely that this would be the case.

Appreciate it,

jestersmith

 

Could you provide pics?

 

Sure thx, here's the driver side:

 

... and here is the passenger:

 

Following up on this one Jester. What did you end up doing?

 

I emailed the wrecking company that I bought it from and talked to a head rebuilder / machine shop about it. In the end I decided to trust the compression results and threw it in. It fired up immediately and sounded great but I had a couple other issues to sort out including cleaning the MAF sensor to clear some codes, PCV valve, and I discovered that the previous owner had farm gas in the tank. Now that I'm past all that -- it runs awesome. Now I'm on to the body work.

(Also, of course -- new spark plug tube and valve cover gaskets.)

 

Thanks for the follow up. Upon doing the valve covers last week, discovered a similar situation as yours with the passenger side very clean and drivers side dirtied up (not nearly as bad as yours but still worse than passenger side).

I think the problem may come from clogged PCV Valve and also the port in which it sits. I had to really blast the cover orifices when the cover was off. I’ll be making the PVC/port cleaning a regular maintenance thing from now on.
Pass side with cleaned cover and new gasket. Tubes look good. Drivers side done next day was worse (tired that day no pics).

 

Yeah, I think you are right and the PCV valve makes the most sense. Even the machinist I talked to wondered if there might be a ventilation issue.