[Mike_The_Grad]

AussieinNC,
That's an interesting thought on running straight water. I'm working on cleaning the block surface and I noticed some junk in the coolant jacket on the passenger side. So I started poking at it with a skinny stiff wire a lot of crap became dislodged. So I grabbed my set of mechanical fingers and I was able to pull a few chunks of junk out of there. The rest i blew out with my hand held Hudson sprayer pump. A lot came out.

The bolt hole next to that area that blew out of the gasket has oil in the threads. I noticed on the small block chevy(or at least mine) that the 4 outside middle head bolts are different length(2 per cylinder head, front and back of the head) vs. The short ones that run along the bottom edge and they're not as long as the upper four bolts that are between the rocker stud bosses. I bring this up because on my engine all four of those bolts had oil soaked threads while all of the others didnt.