The first month of this was a back and forth with a contact in NAPA that was trying to help me out, which fizzled into basically “It’s the shops problem.” The shop it’s stuck at up in Michigan is actually another NAPA certified repair shop, but since NAPA is washing their hands of it, it’s not much help 
(The shop in Michigan, btw, has been very very understanding. A-1 Auto Center Inc in Monroe, MI, they seem like good people)
That was a gamble, and it could have gone either way. I empathize with you, because I took the same gamble on a head gasket on my ‘98 Civic a couple years ago with lucky results.
Well, definitely a gamble with the rest of the vehicle, sure, but not really a gamble for that particular fix… I don’t know how I could have foreseen a fresh engine fix failing in the same spot twice in twelve months. As someone mentioned earlier, they’ve never seen a failed head gasket in our engine.
But yea, sinking money into old cars is always a gamble in the grand scheme of things that can go wrong…
I know it’s little satisfaction (but at least a little satisfaction) is that you’ve told a group of people that a NAPA warranty and a NAPA shop is really not worth a whole lot. Nice to know.
Not that my opinion matters, but I probably would have fixed the car a year ago, too. I would have figured this to be a somewhat straightforward repair done by a competent shop (NAPA affiliation should mean something!) on a paid-for car.
Definitely more satisfaction than stewing on it in my own head!
Did you determine what made the original head gasket go bad?
This reminds me of back in the mid 1990s, my mother delivered to me my grandmother’s old 1984 Mercury Marquis and it overheated on the way. She stopped and got it checked out a couple times, and nobody could figure out why it overheated. Everything checked out, so the next time it overheated, she just kept on driving and blew the engine. She felt so bad about it that she paid to have a rebuilt engine installed, but we never figured out why it overheated. After the new engine was installed, it overheated again, and still, nobody could figure it out. All the parts checked out, even the radiator, but I eventually figured out the radiator must have had clogged passages, and fortunately, I replaced the radiator before any damage was done to the rebuilt engine.
I hated that car. It had one problem after another. The E10 gasoline would destroy rubber components in the carburetor, requiring me to get the carb rebuilt routinely.
Jesus… what a pain! I don’t remember the cause, and the invoice is in the car in Michigan, so I can’t reference it. We got so many calls over the course the month it was in the shop it all blurs together. She was getting regular oil changes so fluids were being topped off, and I checked hers every now and then, so I don’t know what was causing the overheating. After the first repair the wrong size “cap” I believe was put on so I don’t know if that could have caused damage or not. But this is very informative… so many working parts…
If responding to my questions is a pain, feel free to ignore them. 
haha, yea yea yea!