[charlie66]

Originally Posted by 78w72

holy cow, enough with the opinions of head gaskets & guesses on how to retorque a head bolt... just re-torque the bolts & see what it does. chances are it will fix the problem, if not there is no harm done & very little effort involved. who knows, maybe the shop didnt tighten to the right spec, or had a crappy torque wrench? the time spent going back & forth is pointless. no offense intended to anyone who posted but to start calling gaskets "fail-pro" is hilarious & contributes nothing to helping the guy fix his leak. i have used felpros for over 20 years & never had a problem, had friends use them just as long too, on stock low buck rebuilds with no block decking to a 10.7 aluminum head stroker engine, all were just fine with thousands & thousands of miles. & GM didnt use this style gasket because its more expensive than basic metal gaskets that went on millions of cars, plus that design probably didnt exist back in the 60's & early 70's.

also never heard of backing off a bolt when retorquing head bolts or any bolt with a gasket between 2 surfaces... where is that written by any head gasket manufacturer or suggested by any knowledgable machine shop??? not saying its right or wrong, just sayin i've never heard of it untill reading this thread.

& actually i think most gasket companies specifically say to retorque head gaskets after a few heat cycles, simply due to the physics of expanding & contracting metals. or at least edelbrock says to do it regardless of the gasket used. & they dont say anything about backing off the bolt first.

however, on my 78 400 iron head engine with the basic fel-pro head gasket i did have a slight leak of coolant during the first winter storage, nothing as bad as the OP showed, but it seemed to be from the cold, which contracted the metal enough to let some coolant weep out.... without thinking twice i simply retorqued the gaskets to what wallace racing suggests, (a little tighter than stock) & the leak stopped instantly for the next few months of storage without starting the engine. come spring it was leak free & has been for almost 5 years now & thousands of miles.

bottom line, retorque the dang bolts before adding any stop leak or pulling the heads etc... & don't back off the bolts just to go to the same torque spec, seems like that will just put you back exactly where it is now. i agree with chiphead, when you retorque a head bolt you need to do it from where its at to get more clamping force. its not rocket science. if that simple step doesnt work then by all means do what others mention like checking bolt length & head/block surfaces etc. just my .02 since everyone else put in their .02

Well said.

If a bolt losses its torque value it wouldn't need to be turned back to get it back to its original torque setting... Because its now lower in torque value.... So all you need to do is set the wrench an torque it back..,...

Just sayin.....