Livernois heads leaking oil?

[GrnBullitt08]

Am I the only one without issues on these stage 2 heads... I looked mine over before installing and everything was nicely done. To this day with about 3000miles on them I haven't noticed a leak, this thread does make me nervous down the road.... I too am surprised Livernois hasn't came into here...


Someone should PM them this thread.

Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

No we have had no issues with them....like stated in my post above.

 

[mike@livernois]

Sorry for the late reply. I just recieved a PM this morning in regards to this.

I dont know if our situations are related or not but I bought bronze guides from livernoise to put in my heads and the o.d was larger on the bronze guide versus the oem iron guide so i ended up getting told from their tech department to bore out the factory guide hold to accomodate the bigger guide and i had my machinist use livernoise specs, once the heads were put into service i had the same issue you were having, chased the problem forever. thought it was stem seals,changed them, no fix, thought maybe the stem to guide clearances were off, that was fine as well, I decided to do a little more porting in the pockets of my head and went to knock the guides out and to my surprise they came out VERY easily! when I put them back together i used a loctite high temp sleeve retaining compund on the guides when i reinstalled them and I havent had oil in my exhaust ports since. How long that loctite will hold up I dont know but all I can figure is there wasnt enough interference to keep oil from coming down between the head and guide when it was at operating temp and the head was fully expanded. But thats just my

I would like to get a little more information on this if possible. I'm a little confused in regards to "boring out" the guide holes. I know you spoke to somebody here in tech but I'm not sure as to why someone would tell you that. Normally the guide should go in with press and the guide holes should not be modified in anyway. Boring them open might cause there to be too little press and cause problems.

If you could let me know a little further on details that would be helpful. Either through S197 or just calling me. Things like the date, who you spoke with and some more of the particulars would be helpful. Sounds like you have everything installed and running okay at this point but I would still like to get a little more info if possible.

Just spent $600 on replacing the valve guides on my Livernois ST. 3 heads. They had about 1500 miles on them and were complete junk. Tried to talk to Livernois about it but didn't find anything out about what could have caused them to fail so fast.

Could you send me your customer name or any other info you might have so I could look further into this?

I had Livernois do my engine to include their stage III heads and tune it so that if/when something went wrong I knew who to hold accountable. I was buring through oil to the tune of 1/4 quart or so every 650 miles.

Finally got them to turn some wrenches and pull their heads off over this past January/February. Their heads were in such bad shape I wasn't even allowed to see them. The crowns of my pistons were COVERED with a couple millimeters of burnt oil and carbon. I wasn't given the most specific information but I was told they had received some guides and/or seals (this is where the explanation was a little fuzzy) from their suppliers that were out of spec. They also mentioned that the guide had been pressed to deep when they assembled them...imagine how many of these are out there.

In the end they put in a new set of heads....and I am still watching this thing burn oil. Waiting for the borescope to show up and have another look at the pistons.

I'm not to familiar with the vehicle side of operations as far as customers and cars go but I could look further into this if you would like. The heads have been replaced it sounds like at this point but you still have issues with the engine? If this is the case please let me know so that we figure out what is going on with it.

Thanks

 

[Back@itagain]

I'm not to familiar with the vehicle side of operations as far as customers and cars go but I could look further into this if you would like. The heads have been replaced it sounds like at this point but you still have issues with the engine? If this is the case please let me know so that we figure out what is going on with it.

Thanks

I have been monitoring oil consumption of the engine. It isn't as bad as before and this weather is making it difficult to get some miles on the car...nothing like a good snow fall mid April! I'm not sure if it is just due to the forged internals, heads or something else. I expect to have that scope in my hands today. I'll let you guys know how things look...I've got my fingers crossed for now!

Good luck getting Dan's car back together. Glad everyone turned out ok!

 

[mike@livernois]

Received a PM this morning in regards to this thread. Thought I would try to offer some information in regards to the guides.

Yes we did have an issue previously with guides. This goes back some time now as all of the current heads and guides we use now are from a different manufacturer.

We had been using a different manufacturer previously for the guides. We had used them for quite some time without any issues. It was not until we ran into issues last year with oil consumption that we thought that something was not right and there was a possible issue with the guides. After going through the parts we had still on the shelf and doing some analysis we determined that there was a batch of guides we had received that were out of spec. Some of this had to do with the guide bore concentricity. (The location of the ID of the guide hole in relation to the OD of the guide) We spec a tolerance for this concentricity measurement and found on this batch of guides that they were either right at the top of the spec tolerance or just outside the spec tolerance.

The second issue we found with this batch of guides was the material composition of the guide seemed to be incorrect as the hardness and durability of the guides were lower than they should have been. Upon finding these issues with the guides we determined that they were unusable. At the time we had already been using a different guide manufacturer for other high end guides for some of the more racing oriented only heads. We decided to switch over all of our guides to this manufacturer.

For any heads that did get built using the guides that came from the faulty batch we will fix, repair or replace these heads at no charge. While we were unable to get any form of compensation from the company that produced the faulty guides in the end we understand that as a customer of Livernois the responsibility for standing behind that product falls solely on Livernois.

The manufacturer we switched to using for the guides is a leading supplier of bronze guides and supplies NHRA, IRL, SCCA and NASCAR. We initially started using them for the higher end racing level builds we were doing and had great success with their components. We transitioned to using their guides for all of our heads based on this and have had excellent success over the past couple of years. We are confident that the guides they supply us with are the best in the industry.

In relation to this I thought I would explain briefly some of the factors that come into play in specific to the 3 Valve cylinder head and guides. In a more conventional engine where larger stem diameters are used like 5/16 and 3/8 the total contact area the guide has with the valve is much greater than the smaller 7mm (2V & 4V) and even worse on the 6mm stuff (3 valve & 5.0). The small head diameter also means a small contact area between the seat and the valve as well.

The problem created by having a very small area of contact is heat. Excessive heat will kill the guides. As the power level rises and the specific output go up we are faced with an issue of trying to remove this excess heat so that it does not damage components. With the 3 valve cylinder head we are faced with another issue that hurts heat transfer as well. This is that the guides themselves are very short due to the design of the head. This makes the contact area between the OD of the guide and the ID of the cylinder head guide bore very small. That contact area is critical since the area surrounding the guide boss in the cylinder head houses the coolant jacket where water is used to remove heat.

When you take a 3 valve engine and push double, triple or quadruple the stock output you place a very high heat load on the components. The only way the valve can cool itself is through transferring heat to the cylinder head and having the cooling system remove that heat. This means the small contact area between the valve to seat and also the area between the valveguide and valvestem are where all of this transfer must take place. If you can't transfer enough heat quickly enough you will damage the valves and guides.

Given all of these issues we spent a fairly considerable time testing guide designs and manufacturers out to try and ensure that the parts we use would offer enough durability. We tested on some very high specific power output engines (1200+ HP) and worked with the manufacturer to come up with the needed design to ensure that the components would never be pushed near that failure point.

I wanted to share that just to try and offer insight as to what job the guides must do and what considerations must be made when it comes to design and use as it relates to the 3 valve cylinder head.

It's frustrating for us to have run into this issue with these guides as we feel we are always trying to ensure we offer the best products available. Unfortunately we cannot manufacturer all the components in-house that are necessary to build the entire engine and must rely on outside companies to do this for us. In the event of having an issue like this the best we can hope to do is work with any customer affected by this and try and quickly fix the problem and get them taken care of. If someone has issues with their heads and needs assistance please contact me and I will work on getting you setup to handle this.

Thanks

 

[Back@itagain]

Great info Mike...posts like this go a long way!

 

[rojizostang]

is the valve guide issue that you covered also the (probable) cause of the failures in the last couple of years regarding broken valves? there have been several threads on this board with manley valve failures. are you aware of this, or can you comment on this?

 

[Department Of Boost]

For any heads that did get built using the guides that came from the faulty batch we will fix, repair or replace these heads at no charge. While we were unable to get any form of compensation from the company that produced the faulty guides in the end we understand that as a customer of Livernois the responsibility for standing behind that product falls solely on Livernois.

In regards to “fixing” guide problems. What if the heads were purchased through Livernois and the motor was assembled by Livernois but the customer put their own motor in?

Obviously Livernois is not on the hook to R&R the heads on the car. But on the other end of the spectrum the customer paid for the heads, valvetrain, etc to be assembled and if the heads need repairs that labor is now “gone” if the customer pulls the heads themselves.

On one end the customer could pay the shop the labor to “get to the heads” (electronics, intake, headers, etc) and then Livernois covers the cost of everything from the longblock on down.

Or

The customer pulls the motor and delivers it to the shop as a long block and the shop repairs/replaces the heads.

And then there is the cost of gaskets, coolant, etc.

The above options both don’t sound like the best way to go. Would Livernois offer an option somewhere in the middle that is fair to the customer and the shop?

 

[mike@livernois]

Great info Mike...posts like this go a long way!

Glad I could offer some helpful information.

is the valve guide issue that you covered also the (probable) cause of the failures in the last couple of years regarding broken valves? there have been several threads on this board with manley valve failures. are you aware of this, or can you comment on this?

From the failures I have seen I would say no. The issue with the valves I have seen have related more to the lock in most cases. The issue is with the triple groove configuration and the tolerances the stock lock have. Because the way the stock lock is stamped out it sometimes produces a sharp edge at the corner of the groove edge. Each of the 3 grooves in the valve have a small radius edge which engages the lock. The lock has the corresponding radius tongues that fit in these grooves. However if a lock has an excessively bad/sharp edge it may protrude far enough to sit on the radius of the valve groove.

Having a sharp edge sit on the radius of the valve groove is a recipe for disaster as it places all the load in one very small area and will cause the valve to crack in that spot.

As a result of this we have been sorting locks and polishing them to try and ensure this does not happen. The number of locks with improperly formed grooves/sharp edges is very very low but it still happens so we wanted to take steps to eliminate them.

In regards to “fixing” guide problems. What if the heads were purchased through Livernois and the motor was assembled by Livernois but the customer put their own motor in?

Obviously Livernois is not on the hook to R&R the heads on the car. But on the other end of the spectrum the customer paid for the heads, valvetrain, etc to be assembled and if the heads need repairs that labor is now “gone” if the customer pulls the heads themselves.

On one end the customer could pay the shop the labor to “get to the heads” (electronics, intake, headers, etc) and then Livernois covers the cost of everything from the longblock on down.

Or

The customer pulls the motor and delivers it to the shop as a long block and the shop repairs/replaces the heads.

And then there is the cost of gaskets, coolant, etc.

The above options both don’t sound like the best way to go. Would Livernois offer an option somewhere in the middle that is fair to the customer and the shop?

In most cases because every customers circumstances are different we will usually try and work with whatever situation that customer has and come up with something that works.

The preference I would say based on what you listed above is more for Livernois to receive back a complete engine and have Livernois do all the labor in house. This way Livernois can perform as much of the labor in house and cover those costs under warranty. As for the gaskets and any parts associated Livernois would try and provide them at a very reduced cost or no cost at all.

Thanks

 

[07 procharger]

My hat is off to Dan Millen.

He has stepped in and has stood behind Livernois. They replaced my guides, covered the cost of my head gaskets, and apart from an error in shipping that stuck me with a duty tax, took care of that as well.

Unfortunantly I cant get the charge reversed after the fact....but it's taken care of in my eyes. This has been a long ordeal for me and im glad to put it to bed finally.

Again, thanks Dan.

 

[Department Of Boost]

Is there a date range that the guide issue can be narrowed down to?

 

[1/4MILEMUSTANG]

Sorry for the late reply. I just recieved a PM this morning in regards to this.



I would like to get a little more information on this if possible. I'm a little confused in regards to "boring out" the guide holes. I know you spoke to somebody here in tech but I'm not sure as to why someone would tell you that. Normally the guide should go in with press and the guide holes should not be modified in anyway. Boring them open might cause there to be too little press and cause problems.

If you could let me know a little further on details that would be helpful. Either through S197 or just calling me. Things like the date, who you spoke with and some more of the particulars would be helpful. Sounds like you have everything installed and running okay at this point but I would still like to get a little more info if possible.




Could you send me your customer name or any other info you might have so I could look further into this?



I'm not to familiar with the vehicle side of operations as far as customers and cars go but I could look further into this if you would like. The heads have been replaced it sounds like at this point but you still have issues with the engine? If this is the case please let me know so that we figure out what is going on with it.

Thanks

The first set of guides I bought from you guys was a little over a year ago so i dont recall who I delt with but they tolf me the guide hole needed to be reamed .003 over to accomadate for the larger o.d of the valve guide. The motor burned oil at a rediculous rate once up to operating temps. When i redid the heads i ended up using a high temp sleeve retainer and never had a problem again. The heads im getting ready to do now are the ones with the new plug style and I just bought another set of guides from you guys a couple weeks ago but i didnt ask about any special machine work. Ill put my head together with keith Craft on the tolerances for this set. Do you guys just oress them in the way they sit with no machine work to make them fit in the head?

 

[mike@livernois]

Is there a date range that the guide issue can be narrowed down to?

Unfortunately at this point there is not. Because we buy the guides in large volumes there are sometimes numerous batches of guides that fall into one of our orders. All of these guides were kept inventoried as a single part number and the only reference we had was the date of receipt. After discussing with the original guide manufacturer a way of checking them we found that the dates we received the guides in did not follow the order of the batches that the manufacturer had sent them to us. (Basically we received guides from various batches in an out of order sequence because the manufacturer was shipping old stock and new guides at the same time)

Further complicating things was we also built heads for inventory and put them on the shelf. These heads were built at an earlier date then the sale date. Depending on workload and sales volume that meant that heads that were on the shelf in inventory could sit there for weeks or only days.

All we could do because of this is go through and reject everything we had on the shelf at the time, both guides and heads. Prior to this we had already switched over 100% to the new manufacturer because of the possible issues with quality from the original guide manufacturer.

I believe that most of the guides used in the 2010 time frame all came from the new supplier. Previous to that was when we had the other supplier as well. The lack of being able to get batch numbers to correspond with the original receipt date from the manufacturer left us without much way of narrowing down further the older guides. All the guides we receive from the new manufacturer now are batched, dated and trackable.

Thanks

 

[mike@livernois]

The first set of guides I bought from you guys was a little over a year ago so i dont recall who I delt with but they tolf me the guide hole needed to be reamed .003 over to accomadate for the larger o.d of the valve guide. The motor burned oil at a rediculous rate once up to operating temps. When i redid the heads i ended up using a high temp sleeve retainer and never had a problem again. The heads im getting ready to do now are the ones with the new plug style and I just bought another set of guides from you guys a couple weeks ago but i didnt ask about any special machine work. Ill put my head together with keith Craft on the tolerances for this set. Do you guys just oress them in the way they sit with no machine work to make them fit in the head?

Hmm... Well unless they are a guide I'm not familiar with then you should not have to modify the guide hole in any way. When installing guides its always important to measure the guide bore in the head first and then measure the guide to ensure the correct press. The guides require the correct interference to operate properly.

They should just press in as the head sits. Do you happen to have a measurement on the guide bores in the head now?

Thanks

 

[Department Of Boost]

Unfortunately at this point there is not. Because we buy the guides in large volumes there are sometimes numerous batches of guides that fall into one of our orders. All of these guides were kept inventoried as a single part number and the only reference we had was the date of receipt. After discussing with the original guide manufacturer a way of checking them we found that the dates we received the guides in did not follow the order of the batches that the manufacturer had sent them to us. (Basically we received guides from various batches in an out of order sequence because the manufacturer was shipping old stock and new guides at the same time)

Further complicating things was we also built heads for inventory and put them on the shelf. These heads were built at an earlier date then the sale date. Depending on workload and sales volume that meant that heads that were on the shelf in inventory could sit there for weeks or only days.

All we could do because of this is go through and reject everything we had on the shelf at the time, both guides and heads. Prior to this we had already switched over 100% to the new manufacturer because of the possible issues with quality from the original guide manufacturer.

I believe that most of the guides used in the 2010 time frame all came from the new supplier. Previous to that was when we had the other supplier as well. The lack of being able to get batch numbers to correspond with the original receipt date from the manufacturer left us without much way of narrowing down further the older guides. All the guides we receive from the new manufacturer now are batched, dated and trackable.

Thanks

Have you guys done any testing to see if there is a leakdown "pattern" with the goofy heads? I know there are a ton of other variables so I wouldn't be suprised if it couldn't be done as "science", but I figured I would ask.

 

[05stroker]

The first set of guides I bought from you guys was a little over a year ago so i dont recall who I delt with but they tolf me the guide hole needed to be reamed .003 over to accomadate for the larger o.d of the valve guide. The motor burned oil at a rediculous rate once up to operating temps. When i redid the heads i ended up using a high temp sleeve retainer and never had a problem again. The heads im getting ready to do now are the ones with the new plug style and I just bought another set of guides from you guys a couple weeks ago but i didnt ask about any special machine work. Ill put my head together with keith Craft on the tolerances for this set. Do you guys just oress them in the way they sit with no machine work to make them fit in the head?

Hmm... Well unless they are a guide I'm not familiar with then you should not have to modify the guide hole in any way. When installing guides its always important to measure the guide bore in the head first and then measure the guide to ensure the correct press. The guides require the correct interference to operate properly.

They should just press in as the head sits. Do you happen to have a measurement on the guide bores in the head now?

Thanks

When I did my heads I had to ream the guide for the valve to insure proper clearance but, the guides pressed in the head as they should.

 

[mike@livernois]

Have you guys done any testing to see if there is a leakdown "pattern" with the goofy heads? I know there are a ton of other variables so I wouldn't be suprised if it couldn't be done as "science", but I figured I would ask.

We've tried a couple of different methods of checking finished heads but nothing has ever been very consistent. The only surefire method we came up with was sending the guides out in question to have the material analyzed. (Hardness, composition, etc.) The faulty guides produce different test results then a normal guide.

Thanks

 

[mike@livernois]

When I did my heads I had to ream the guide for the valve to insure proper clearance but, the guides pressed in the head as they should.

Okay, I think I misunderstood what you were saying originally. I thought you were talking about reaming out the guide bore in the cylinder head. This would be a problem if you reamed the aluminum cylinder head bore.

Reaming or honing the guide bore ID to ensure proper valvestem to guide clearance is correct. There should be between .002-.003 to remove in that case.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Thanks

 

[Back@itagain]

Received a PM this morning in regards to this thread. Thought I would try to offer some information in regards to the guides.

Yes we did have an issue previously with guides. This goes back some time now as all of the current heads and guides we use now are from a different manufacturer.

We had been using a different manufacturer previously for the guides. We had used them for quite some time without any issues. It was not until we ran into issues last year with oil consumption that we thought that something was not right and there was a possible issue with the guides. After going through the parts we had still on the shelf and doing some analysis we determined that there was a batch of guides we had received that were out of spec. Some of this had to do with the guide bore concentricity. (The location of the ID of the guide hole in relation to the OD of the guide) We spec a tolerance for this concentricity measurement and found on this batch of guides that they were either right at the top of the spec tolerance or just outside the spec tolerance.

The second issue we found with this batch of guides was the material composition of the guide seemed to be incorrect as the hardness and durability of the guides were lower than they should have been. Upon finding these issues with the guides we determined that they were unusable. At the time we had already been using a different guide manufacturer for other high end guides for some of the more racing oriented only heads. We decided to switch over all of our guides to this manufacturer.

For any heads that did get built using the guides that came from the faulty batch we will fix, repair or replace these heads at no charge. While we were unable to get any form of compensation from the company that produced the faulty guides in the end we understand that as a customer of Livernois the responsibility for standing behind that product falls solely on Livernois.

The manufacturer we switched to using for the guides is a leading supplier of bronze guides and supplies NHRA, IRL, SCCA and NASCAR. We initially started using them for the higher end racing level builds we were doing and had great success with their components. We transitioned to using their guides for all of our heads based on this and have had excellent success over the past couple of years. We are confident that the guides they supply us with are the best in the industry.

In relation to this I thought I would explain briefly some of the factors that come into play in specific to the 3 Valve cylinder head and guides. In a more conventional engine where larger stem diameters are used like 5/16 and 3/8 the total contact area the guide has with the valve is much greater than the smaller 7mm (2V & 4V) and even worse on the 6mm stuff (3 valve & 5.0). The small head diameter also means a small contact area between the seat and the valve as well.

The problem created by having a very small area of contact is heat. Excessive heat will kill the guides. As the power level rises and the specific output go up we are faced with an issue of trying to remove this excess heat so that it does not damage components. With the 3 valve cylinder head we are faced with another issue that hurts heat transfer as well. This is that the guides themselves are very short due to the design of the head. This makes the contact area between the OD of the guide and the ID of the cylinder head guide bore very small. That contact area is critical since the area surrounding the guide boss in the cylinder head houses the coolant jacket where water is used to remove heat.

When you take a 3 valve engine and push double, triple or quadruple the stock output you place a very high heat load on the components. The only way the valve can cool itself is through transferring heat to the cylinder head and having the cooling system remove that heat. This means the small contact area between the valve to seat and also the area between the valveguide and valvestem are where all of this transfer must take place. If you can't transfer enough heat quickly enough you will damage the valves and guides.

Given all of these issues we spent a fairly considerable time testing guide designs and manufacturers out to try and ensure that the parts we use would offer enough durability. We tested on some very high specific power output engines (1200+ HP) and worked with the manufacturer to come up with the needed design to ensure that the components would never be pushed near that failure point.

I wanted to share that just to try and offer insight as to what job the guides must do and what considerations must be made when it comes to design and use as it relates to the 3 valve cylinder head.

It's frustrating for us to have run into this issue with these guides as we feel we are always trying to ensure we offer the best products available. Unfortunately we cannot manufacturer all the components in-house that are necessary to build the entire engine and must rely on outside companies to do this for us. In the event of having an issue like this the best we can hope to do is work with any customer affected by this and try and quickly fix the problem and get them taken care of. If someone has issues with their heads and needs assistance please contact me and I will work on getting you setup to handle this.

Thanks

Does all this apply to both the old and the new castings? Have you found any difference with any of issues between the two castings (old 2 piece design castings and newer 1 piece) relating to this issue, water jackets, sealing with the head gaskets, etc.?

Thanks

 

[05stroker]

Okay, I think I misunderstood what you were saying originally. I thought you were talking about reaming out the guide bore in the cylinder head. This would be a problem if you reamed the aluminum cylinder head bore.

Reaming or honing the guide bore ID to ensure proper valvestem to guide clearance is correct. There should be between .002-.003 to remove in that case.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Thanks

So we are clear , I was talking about valve clearance . It was another member that said he had to add clearance in the guide bore for the guides .

I had my heads done with your guides buy a local shop that for lack of better words is very anal in checking clearances and tolerances on head builds for high hp builds like mine . I fell very confident, at this point, that if there was an issue , he would have found it.

 

[mike@livernois]

Does all this apply to both the old and the new castings? Have you found any difference with any of issues between the two castings (old 2 piece design castings and newer 1 piece) relating to this issue, water jackets, sealing with the head gaskets, etc.?

Thanks

Yes, this applies to both the old and new style castings. At this point we've not really found any differences in the castings themselves that would be noteworthy enough to cause any performance difference. With exception of the spark plug design and valve cover arrangement almost everything else is identical.

So we are clear , I was talking about valve clearance . It was another member that said he had to add clearance in the guide bore for the guides .

I had my heads done with your guides buy a local shop that for lack of better words is very anal in checking clearances and tolerances on head builds for high hp builds like mine . I fell very confident, at this point, that if there was an issue , he would have found it.

Right, valve clearance. I missed that somehow.

Sounds like everything should be good with your setup then.

Thanks