I have a friend of mine, who has a daughter, who has a '93 Civic DX coupe. It was "using" water - no leaks. Although performance wasn't noticeably down (it has an auto tranny, so who would notice!!) Around 195K miles on it. From all I could tell, NOTHING had ever been done to the engine other than oil changes and plugs.
So, we took a Saturday and changed: head, intake, exhaust gaskets; plugs; timing and all other belts; distributor cap & rotor; water pump; thermostat. Cleaned all the injectors, installed new seals and gaskets. Flushed the cooling system. Put it all back together. Adjusted the valves. Of course, the only difficulty that we had was the crank shaft pulley bolt. We ended up finding a 1" impact on a system with a 80-gallon 160-psi tank, and it still took it about 30 seconds to pop it loose! So -- to answer your question. It can happen! I, personally, don't think that there is much chance of the head being cracked unless you've run it without coolant, and done some extreme heat cycling of it (got the head to 300 degrees, and threw buckets of ice water on it, for example!!) More than likely you're gonna need to replace the head gasket. One word of caution here: don't skimp on these pieces, use a Honda head gasket, timing belt, and distributor cap and rotor. I think for everything we did on this car the total cost of all the pieces/parts/fluids was less than $200. Of course, you need to find a "friend" who has the tools and experience if you do not!! Total time of work was around 6 hours. David '89 CRX DX, white, 202K miles '90 CRX Si, yellow, 49K miles '94 Helix, black, 17K miles '02 Civic EX, ruby, 30K miles -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 7:28 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: CRX: Head Gasket? I have a 90 Si, that has been mysteriously loosing coolant without any leaks recently. I haven't had much of a chance to try and diagnose yet and was wondering if this was a common problem? The woman I bought the car from had to have the head gasket replaced at 60k miles, I believe. The car now has 114k with a similar problem? Is the 1.6 prone to this problem? What are the chances the head is cracked?
