Head Bolt Torque - m20b25 oil leaks

[McGyver]

I recently slapped a refreshed 885 head on my m20b25. The original head was cracked and let coolant into the combustion chamber. I got a really grungy head, stripped it down, cleaned it up, and lapped in the valves. The head was NOT machined as I'm only trying to get 3-6 months out of this engine while I build a 2.7i. I cleaned/dried all the head bolt holes in the block, wiped the head and block with acetone, and lightly lubed the new torx bolts with engine oil. I used a new Elring head gasket.

The new bolts were torqued using the correct pattern to 30Nm (wait 15 min), 90* (wait 15 min), 90* while the engine was cold.

45 miles into driving it and I'm getting oil weeping from both sides of the #6 cylinder on the passenger side. Can I seal it better by adding more torque to the back few head bolts, or is this the "cost" of skipping the machine shop?

[MrBurgundy]

I mean maybe when you dropped the head down on the gasket you smashed it. But also, yeah, could be the price you're gonna pay for not machining it.

In my experience, adding more torque to something that was done to spec to stop a leak just made it worse.

Also maybe its the rubber plugs on the back of the head. Those leak all the time and will run down the same way.

[digger]

leaks there often, you need to put a some goop to seal the oil reurn holes. i have had ok luck retorqueing ARP to eliminate a similar leak on #1 but your bolts arent re-torquable.

If you dont want to redo the job, you could experimnet by something similar but youd have to remove the closest bolt(s) and put in some new bolts (in the local area one at a time) now the gasket has "relaxed" a bit you may get slighty better results but idk. Or for cheap get some gr12.9 socket head cap screws (kinda like metric blues) as those can be torqued over time to address gasket creep and bolt relaxaton but none will fix major "flaws" in flatness etc

[TobyB]

Since they're tty bolts, you could give them all another 30 degrees
(in the correct sequence) and it wouldn't hurt anything.

But I'd be surprised if it helped...

t

[McGyver]

I guess I'll try another 30 degrees on all the bolts. Perhaps heat cycling it will have relaxed something. If the leak gets really bad, I'll look into gr12.9 socket head cap screws or just replacing all the TTY bolts 1-at-a-time with a new set.