355 No compression on cylinder 2

I cannot hear your car from here.

 

A. Its far from a race car. You are starting to sound like a car salesman.

B. Just because it needs a valve job is hardly justification for doing a restoration.

 

And for those of us who have either done or over seen hundreds of 355 valve jobs I can tell you if # 2 is bad enough to have large compression loss all cylinders will have valve guides way over the wear limit and all 16 exhaust valves will have stem wear well over the limits.

You speak as though none of that will be checked or measured when the job is done and some automaton will just rip it all apart and replace everything in its path. Before I even begin to take a car all to pieces I try very hard to make the client aware of where this is all likely to goi to give the client some way to make some intelligent decisions. If after its apart if its less, great. But you seem to prefer I keep my experience to myself and minimize for the client what this will probably cost. Sorry but that is just plain dishonest and very poorly serving the client.
You don't have the experience to be making that type of prediction for your client. Those of us who actually do this and have done it since the 355 were new cars do.

When I was attending Ferrari engine school the instructor asked the class what was the proper way to measure valve guide wear. One of the guys in class said "when you can put 2 valves down the same guide". We all laughed but its true. No one needs a go no go gauge on these valve guides. Ray Charles could have seen they are worn out because it is never by just a little. You would not know that but you come here regularly professing you do.

Your advice does not advance the conversation. Maybe you should spend more time listening.

 

One sign of a cracked header is little pieces of the insulation on the intake plenums. If you have them they are typically about 1/4" long and look like a short piece of thin, white thread. If you see that you can do a smoke test on the headers without removing them. That is what signaled my headers failing. After I removed them I did another smoke test. Even with all that smoke I could not see the crack with a bore scope.

 

I have seen two burnt valves / zero compression 355. Not a big sample. The first one is a few posts up above and it had sintered iron valve guides that failed. Probably because it was driven sedately and caused too much carbon build up, or maybe bad sintered valve job like Brian stated.

The second one has bronze guides that failed in the typical 355 failure of Cylinder 2. Worn valve guides, loss of heat dissipation, and burnt valve. Each time, a full valve job was done on both heads with new guides and valves, and replacement of the affected cylinder liners were required.

Image Unavailable, Please Login

Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

You knocked out and replaced all the sintered steel guides for the first car? They were all bad?

 

Great news. Still a little costly though.

 

How many miles did you put on the car (and how hard did you drive it) with the cracked header? Hard to imagine a burned valve like that from a couple hundred miles of street driving. But what do I know.