Head Gasket

We may earn a small commission from affiliate links and paid advertisements. Terms

KyleCrews

Senior Member
I've heard that an easy way to rasie the compression ratio of my h23 would be to remove one of the three layers of my head gasket. I'll have the engine out of the car and pretty much dismantled so i figured why not. My question is do you think i will have to get a new head gasket and just leave a layer out or could i reuse the one thats on there. The engine only has about 45,000 miles on it. Also if removing one layer bumps the compression up some then would removing two layers raise it more or is this not a smart thing to do. Just looking for a few extra horses because i don't have the money for higher compression pistions. Also about how much more compression could i expect by removing one or two layers of the gasket. Thanxs.
 
never reuse a head gasket.. get a new one.. i wouldn't remove more than one of them.

maybe mill the head .020 while its out instead
 
About how much would it cost to get the head milled? And does anyone know a place near Jacksonville FL that i can get it milled.
 
well first what kind of compression are you wanting to run
 
I'm thinking now that i'm going to wait to do all that cause i'll have to get a new gasket when i do that H23vtec next month. I'd like to raise it close to what the h22 is running. I think the h23 is like 9.0 and the vtec is 10.6. I'd be milling the h22 head. Is it possible to raise it that much without gettting higher compression pistons? And if i do raise it is there anything else i will need to get such as stronger head bolts from arp or something?
 
i wouldn't worry to much about just .020

i paaid like 30 bucks to get mine done

i'd guess you'd bump the compression by like .3 or .4
 
milling the head is a risky modification, either remove two gaskets, two is fine, as long as your deck surface is a smooth as a model's butt, or get custom pistons by JE. JE makes great custom piston. i had on JE 12.5:1 piston, but putting the B16A2 head will lower it, so i removed 2 gaskets, but i had it smoothed out to .0001, which is barely anything.
 
when pulling a layer or two off the head gasket, what do you do about those small brass rings that hold the three layers together, remove, or leave on? Are they needed?
 
NO, you cannot remove more than one layer from your oem honda head gasket. each of the outside area of the two outter layers have a black coating (sealant) on them, so to have bare metal to bare metal on a head gasket would be insane. the only layer you can take out is the middle layer because the other two have sealing coating on them. see below how the outter layer has the black coating?

i-1.jpg
 
the brass fittings are cut and thrown out, and yes, only ONE layer taken from oem.


Milan
 
Back
Top