thedjjack wrote:yojimbo wrote:And if you do the belts, do the tensioners too, the balance one in particular has a short life span. Head wise, if you have to replace it, a lot of the aftermarket ones are pretty rubbish.
I wonder if the L300 "head cracking reputation" is from aftermarket heads being put on?
It's possible or at least its part of the statistics in some way shape or form, but I think the head is prone to it, and maybe cheap ones more so. I expect its a problem with the material or shape which means the heat cycling plus vibration of a diesel causes it to crack over time, I expect mine has cracks in it for instance, but there's no evidence of it. I spoke to a Pajero owner a while back, he'd swapped his paj for something else, but before doing so had engine work, not head related, but the head had been taken off, it was riddled with cracks and had 150k miles or something on it. But still ran ok. He was also a traffic cop, and spoke to a lot of our recovery guys during incidents, and they had said the 4d56 engined vehicles were incredibly reliable and they rarely got called out to them for engine problems. So its an interesting contrast, if you overheat the vehicle and take the head off, it might be full of cracks, but if it is, they could be 'somewhat' unrelated to the overheating, and just be there, unless they occur somewhere it matters.
Over here we see a lot of 4D56 heads on ebay, and people are warned off the cheap knockoffs due to a lack of longevity, but, over here, head failure often results in the vehicle being scrapped. We pay a relatively low price for them, you guys pay a lot more, so it wouldnt surprise me that someone overheated the head and warped it over there, due to lack of cooling maintenance, swapped a cheap head on it to sell it on and get back some money, and the new owner gets a time bomb.
