Using a digital camera to find bad spots in a gasket

I try to take pistures of things as I dismantle them. Mostly so that I can see how they were, and can then see how to put them back together again. LOL

But there are other advantages to using a digital camera to keep track of things. One example being to help find an elusive leak in a gasket.

This is my vanguard briggs. It has been leaking at the seam where the pan bolts to the block.


I suspected the spot where it was leaking, but wanted to know for sure.

You can look at the pieces of gasket left attached to each half, but it can be a pain trying to "match them up."

I took a picture of each. Then rotated one to be oriented the same as the other. Then flipped that one horizontally. Now the two halves have exactly the same profile.

Now you can easily look at the gasket on one half, and find the gaps. Then look at the other half and see if there is a piece of gasket that corresponds to that.

As it happens in this case, I suspected the leak to be between the two small red lines in the upper half of the picture. And sure enough, there is no gasket there on either half.

Further, there is a piece of gasket pointed out by the yellow arrows. If I hadn't done the comparo, I might have dismissied that piece of gasket as having just flopped in there when I took the pan off.

But since I did the comparo, I took a closer look at it, and it became obvious that that was most of the missing gasket, and that it had not been sandwiched between the pieces of metal, but had been hanging down inside the pan for a long time.

And there's your leak!

thats why i coat my gaskets in either RTV/hi-temp 'form-a-gasket' or copper gasket maker

I use rtv instead of a gasket, but you've just got to watch you don't get the crank end play too tight. Although I haven't found it to be an issue on the worn out old junk I usually work with. Guess somebody had that engine apart before and slapped it back together with those old gaskets.