Cylinder head removal/stuck cylinder sleeve

[Bredmon98]

Hi all, I know I'm about 12 years late responding to this, but I ran into the same problem while attempting to do my first waterboxer rebuild. If you cannot pry the sleeves off when you first take off the heads, don't bother pulling and prying on those ears and risking knicking your head gasket surface. Here's what you do:

Take off the heads with the stuck sleeves. Preheat your oven to 250 degrees F. Bake the head for 30 minutes. When you take it back out, throw ice in the cylinders and bang on it with a deadblow hammer. THEY WILL COME OUT, I PROMISE.

Cheers,

-- Brent

[djkeev]

The trick to this is convincing the Mrs. that baking your engine parts in her oven is a GOOD thing!

Dave
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[Bredmon98]

Ixnay on what I said! If you're going to bake your heads, bake them at like 190 degrees F (aka: operating temp) I baked mine too hot and they CRACKED! Doh! Set me back about $1000

[IdahoDoug]

Ouch! Very, very kind of you to check back in and update that. Thanks.

Doug
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[bobhill8]

I've been working on this the last few days. I had one cylinder sleeve stuck to each head, and one that was free almost immediately. I had the advantage of time, and kept spraying them with PBlaster, while prying, twisting, tapping,etc several times a day. As is often the case, patience and determination paid off.
Then I was able to replace the lower cylinder o rings without removing the cylinder sleeves, following the suggestions of the BenPlace video:

http://benplace.com/pistons_heads_video.htm

[kirtfitzpatrick]

I came up with this trick after three days of trying everything to get a stuck cylinder off the head. Worked a treat. Cylinder popped off like it was nothing and it protects the head at the same time.

Two flathead screw drivers, one big, one normal, at right angles. Use the small one as a fulcrum for the big one as close to the cylinder tab as you can get it. It increases the leverage 3x to 5x compared to a pry bar or using the edge of the head as a fulcrum.

I made a video on how to do it too:


Link

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[iliketowalk]

Great video -- thanks for sharing / contributing that!
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