Magazine article, owner experiences head gasket failure on late afternoon drive, so used cell phone while waiting for tow truck to order up new gasket delivered to his home. Tow truck, owner, & car arrive back at home early morning next day. Mid-morning, head gasket arrives. Owner has had time for a nap, so head gasket installed by owner that afternoon, car back on the road that evening. This is the sort of thing that would take me at least several weeks … lol … just curious, anybody here ever done an impromptu head gasket job (or other major repair) like that?
Pretty much all my repairs are impromptu 
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I’ve had head gaskets replaced at least once. Took a week. Heads sent to the machine shop for flattening, checked for cracks, etc. new $10 head bolts. Cost me over $1000, years ago. The nice thing was they worked while I was on vacation and even put the car in the garage when finished. I have a reason for my opinions, take it or leave it.
If someone has the tools, an adequate place to work, a vehicle that allows the owner to get to the head easily, and the experience to do it, of course it can be done that fast.
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What kind of car/engine?
Ever watch top fuel racing, they replace everything but the crankshaft and block in every top fuel engine between EVERY round in about 20 minutes… What takes you (and ME) so long…
But I have seen guys replace head gaskets on the Chevy LS3 engines in a few hours… Now that is just removing the heads, throwing a straight edge across it and hoping for the best, nothing broke or was stuck/seized and all went smoothly… He had also done a lot of them…
I have removed the engine from start to on the floor (safely) in 2 hours on the big U-Haul top kicks gas engines many times… No lifts
I had the engine and transmission pulled out from the top in my home garage in 2 hours on a 1987 Park Ave 3.8L…
Not hard you just have to know what you are doing…
I watched a guy pull a 4.6 NorthStar (Deville) transmission out in under 2 hours a few times… He was stupid fast, but all he had ever done was R&R transmissions…He also broke a lot of oil pressure switches… lol
Dis guy named WFP with the orange Camaro 68/70? Air cleaner, distributor and radiator hose and rocker cover off before work. Exhaust manifold, intake manifold and head off during break. During lunch he cleaned the head and block and installed head and new gasket and installed the exhaust manifold. Afternoon break he installed the intake and distributor and connected the hose and refilled coolant. After work he finished putting everything else on. Drove home. Of course he had some help. I had nothing to do with it but marvelled when the head came inside and upon button up.
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My first repair job was when I was 16 and blew the head gasket on our 47 Frazer by flogging it. it was a flathead six Continental engine, so pretty simple. I got all the head bolts out and could not get the head off. My stepfather came down and took a try and he could not get it to budge either. He then started the car and blew the head off. Pretty easy after that.
Just checked the head for straightness on a cast iron saw table.
My next one was a 61 Dodge polyhead 318 that I started leaking by over revving it while racing a 327 Chevy.
I pulled both heads, saw no obvious leaks, the steel head gaskets were intact so I tool the heads to MAPa to get the heads cleaned, checked and magmafluxed. No cracks found, the only conc;usiom was that the high revs caused seeping past the stamped steel head gaskets. I used a more compliant aftermarket gasket and all was well.
The Frazer took a few hours and the Dodge overnight because I had to wait for the machine shop.
A head gasket on a modern car needs a tad more care than in the days of old. Some even require a pattern to detorque and remove the head. Then you need to make sure the surfaces are clean and flat, etc. This is not something I would want to do on the side of the road or a parking lot unless I was extremely experienced.
The closest I can think of is the time I changed a timing belt on the side of the road. Luckily it was a non-interference engine and it was running like a champ after I went home and found a used one that fit the car. I drove it home and left it parked into a new kit arrived in the mail. I didn’t bother to put the cover back on until I did the final work and changed the water pump and couple other things at the same time.
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I call BS on the article. Head gaskets don’t fail unless one of three things occurred: 1) the gasket itself, or its installation was low quality, 2) the head bolts relaxed due to repeated thermal cycling over 100,000 miles or more, 3) the engine was overheated.
In all of these scenarios, you are going to want to take the head to a professional machine shop to be cleaned and reconditioned (resurfacing, test for hairline cracks, valve re-grind, new valve stem seals, new camshaft seals, etc) before reinstalling. So no, it’s not a one-day job.
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Classic Land Rover w/turbo-diesel engine. Failure was from cylinder to diesel injector port.
lol … that’s putting one’s noggin’ to a head job … lol … I’ll store that idea in my bag of tricks just in case 
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Let me introduce you to the idea of the “slip-n-slide” head gasket replacement, which can be done on a transverse mounted inline-4. It involves simply draining the coolant, removing the head bolts, and with the timing belt, manifolds, etc., still installed tilting the head up, off of the alignment dowels, just enough to slide the old gasket out and slide a new one in.
Great when you’re flat-rating.
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I replaced the head gasket twice on my 93 Suzuki Swift. No problem doing it in one afternoon. All depends on the car.
So in a nutshell, because of wage theft perpetrated by business owners/management against the technicians, sub-standard work is done, and the customer suffers.
Let’s face it. Even though the shop only has to warranty its work for a year, when a customer spends thousands of dollars to have a major repair done, such as a head gasket replacement, they do so with the expectation that the work is done properly, and will hold up for many years/tens of thousands of miles of use. This kind of “repair” doesn’t last for much longer than a year or two, and certainly isn’t going to last for 100,000+ miles like a proper repair would.
Here’s a novel idea. Business owners and managers need to pay their employees fairly, and stop trying to cheat them out of their wages. If an employee is on the clock, doing company business, then they need to get paid to do the job right, period. No “book time”, no straight commission, no BS.
I am not a professional mechanic, and the only cars I work on are my own personal vehicles. So I do not have to worry about pleasing an employer or customer, and I certainly don’t have to worry about completing work within “industry-standard” repair times, etc. I am not a business, and I’m not trying to turn a profit. If I need to spend 36 hours doing a repair on a $2000 car, that is fine–even if professional price books say the job “should” take 6 or 7 hours.
All I care about is doing a good job, which will result in long-lasting functionality.
I’m sure that you do. If your work is substandard you will soon be out of a job, no? And if you spend 36 hours on a heat pump replacement that usually takes 6-7 hours your employer will certainly discuss it with you.
Well, I think we all agree that those that are more efficient at their jobs should be rewarded appropriately. The problem with straight hourly pay is that there’s no easy way to reward the achievers and penalize the slackers without creating wide disparities in pay rates. So we use flat-rate.
I was recently talking to 2 mechanics, both worked on the same brand of cars and did generally similar work. Both made about the same paycheck per week and did the same quality work. Charlie gets to work between 7:00 and 7:30 and stays till closing time at 6:30. Louie gets in around 9 and leaves at 4. Properly compensating these techs via hourly pay would get very tricky.
Will this allow for cleaning off all the surfaces and checking flatness? If there is warpage, it will have to come apart to have any chance of holding up long.
This is basically the same car as a Geo Metro which is about the easiest car to work on. The 3 cylinders are especially easy to work on with all that room under the hood. The Swift had options for the 3 cylinder and 2x variations of a 4 cylinder. The 3 cylinder and one of the 4 cylinders are non-interference SOHC. The hopped up 4 cylinder is an interference DOHC. Only the SOHC engines were available on the Geo Metro but they were the same engines as the Swift came with.
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One word - ACCESS. Well over half the job is removing everything in the way of the heads. If the engine on my wifes Lexus is as accessible as one of those fuel cars, I could replace a head-gasket in less than an hour, instead of 2 days.
I don’t believe you could remove a cylinder head from a 2GR engine in one hour with the engine on a stand. Before a cylinder head can be removed, the oil pan, timing chain cover and camshafts must be removed. The oil pan and timing chain cover surfaces are sealed with form-in-place gasket, the surfaces must be spotless before assembly.
