Jinma 385 head gasket repair

Did you purchase the tractor new ? Did you do a head re-torque at 50 hours ?

Most of the time that's what the problem is, you can have the head ground some if needed,

Tommy

Affordable Tractor Sales

“Your Jinma Parts Superstore”

http://www.affordabletractorsalesco.com

Just so you don't get confused, what Tommy said shouldn't be interpreted to mean that you can just go in and re-torque your existing head gasket and be okay – you can't.  It needs to be replaced with a new one.  And then you do need to do are-torque and valve lash adjustment at 50 hours.

There is no need for any gasket compound with most modern head gaskets and it is easy to gook up things with too much of the stuff so I recommend not using any.  In the way old days, copper compound was good for conducting heat away form the head on flathead engines, but these days they use water jackets.  (grin)

Unless your head is more than .005″ out of planar, I'd just put it back on with a new gasket.

I'm glad to see someone else using oil analysis too.

The minimal cost is easily justified.

I think that the reusal of the cylinder head bolts would be ok ,no difference that I know of reusing the head bolts than retorqueing the head. If there is any hard junk on them I would be careful and run a tap in the block and a die on the bolts,but make sure that when you do this that there is no unusal amount of metal being taken off.Stop if there is,some difference in thread pitching I have seen.Though mostly threads are cut to loose.

if possible use a bottom tap instead of a taper tap ,I assume that the effected threads were at the end of the bolt placing the problem at the bottom of the hole.also check the hole depth maybe the bolt is bottoming out.