Head Gasket Question before I torque it up..

Here's a picture (hopefully) of the head gasket that came off of my engine - the new gasket is an exact duplicate (Fel-Pro). There are 6 triangular shaped holes in the head that appear to be water passages. However the gasket only matches 2 out of the 6 openings - the other 4 are small circular holes. Seems like this would cause uneven distribution of flow due to the difference in pressure drop??

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maybee im just missing the point of your ? the gassget in the pic is just gummed up with crud. the tri holes are water passes and they are all the same rut around in there with a small scew driver. and see thats what it looks like any way. like i said maybee i missed the point

I had the same thought Pyro. Looks like your water jackets have a lot of crud in them. You might want to see what you can scrape out. Cover the pistons so nothing drops in there. Also, check your radiator for crud as well. All my water jackets were filled with crud in my old motor and it was constantly overheating. You might fix a cooling problem while you are in there.

I'm doing a complete rebuild so the block and head have been hot tanked, machined, etc. It may look like those holes are fouled, but that's the way the gasket was manufactured - i.e. there are 4 holes approximately 1/8" diameter vs the other two tri holes which match the head. New gasket is exactly the same. I've got a call in to Fel-pro to see if it makes a difference..

I just went in the garage and looked at two other brand head gaskets and they are the same way. Obviously there is some water flow control going on in the design of the gasket, but it does seem odd that the factory would cast all the holes the same large way and then rely on the gasket to control the flows. Maybe it's how they ensure the flow is restricted in the right places, but the passages in the block aren't so small that they plug up.