M103, removed head to replace gasket. Have a look.

[danwatt]

Bought a 300CE a couple of days ago for dirt cheap, excellent body, excellent interior, blown head gasket. No big deal, while I've been away from MB for awhile I've replaced a few m103 head gaskets years ago and never had a problem.

However, it looks like the seller really drove this into the ground. While there miraculously was no milkshake in oil or coolant, there was what appeared to be a ton of stop leak in all the coolant passages. No big deal, just a lot of cleaning work and maybe a new rad/heater core.

But the combustion chambers themselves looked pretty nasty.

The two center cylinders were wet, lots of scale on them. That cleaned up easily. But there is a good amount of pitting evident on both the piston top and the cylinder head on these two cylinders. I'm guessing that the head warped enough to let coolant into cyl's 3+4 through the coolant jackets. This cativated leading to these lovely pits.

I'll grab my feeler gauges and straight edge out of storage tomorrow but I'm questioning whether I should bother saving this engine or just grab a long block from the junkyard. I saw a 300TE with 70k there yesterday.
I've never come across such heavy pitting before and while I can't find any cracks in the head nor any pitting in the cylinder walls I'm thinking that if I can't get the pits out its just going to cause hot spots which will lead to predetonation which will kill the bottom end (if its not dead already from that, just realized that!)

So I'm posting this to get opinions. Get the head milled down and salvage this engine or just start (junkyard) fresh?





Piston: