it’s not like only a couple people have had problems with cometic, these are guys making 400+whp, i even saw one guy making 700. i’m pretty sure they’re having their head and block machined before they put them together considering how much it costs to make 700whp. there may be alot of tards on honda-tech but type in cometic under the search engine and look at all the negative stories. i don’t have personal experience but i take joe’s word for it on anything. get oem if it’s 81mm, anything bigger golden eagle.
OEM is tried and true, many times over. People have made gobs of power on them, same with Cometic, well tested. No product is without issues entirely, so a failure rate of .001% or whatever is to be expected. Head gaskets are a very simple part, and depend ENTIRELY on the surface of the head and block. They don’t just fail unless something was wrong with the installation.
H-T is filled with morons who say this or that is junk because of one small issue they ran into personally. These are people with a fleeting knowledge of how thier motor works, not some one you’d put weight on thier suggestions.
OP: Why do you think you need a headgasket? It’s not a part of the 90-100K service procedure, you shouldn’t mess with it unless you have verified it for sure via excessive WHITE smoke in the exhaust, leakdown test, etc. If it is in fact in good shape, and you are changing it in anticipation of your future boost setup, think about how a small change in compression will affect your turbo setup, and weigh it against the effort/cost involved
for example… ctr pistons in my LS block were “out-of-the-hole” a couple thou. if the right oversized head gasket wasn’t in that motor, it would be smackin into it and causing problems. Just one more thing to reconize when building a motor
oem timing belts are a good choice for 99 percent of all cars out there.
and my cometic gasket has seen tons of knock and boost up to 30psi. no troubles. Make sure you get a set of arps to lock that head down and properly prepare the surfaces.
update: OEM 81mm head gasket worked fine on 81.5mm bore with 9:1 CP pistons, pistons were a couple thousands lower than the top of the bore. Did a lot of research after posting this question and a lot of builders (Ex. Evans & Justice) will use this gasket on a 81.5 bore without any reprecussions.