Head Studs

[BolletuH]

Yes, another head stud thread, but thought I would ask the community. Looking at installing some head studs just to keep the head from blowing the gasket in a preventative type fashion. Question for the community is has anyone had a failure from doing the 1x1 method? A lot of shops downright refuse to do it like this to limit liability. I didn't think it would be that big of a deal.

Also, about how much in labor were you charged for a set of 425s to install? Prefer to have a shop do them as opposed to myself.

 

[SouthTexan]

Head gasket failures aren't really that much of an issue on the 2013 and up Cummins as they were with the 2007.5-2012 engines. There are multiple reasons for this, and a lot of his to do with the tuning of the engine. Ironically all three of the diesel pickup manufacturers had head gasket issues when they first went with VG turbos and again, a lot of that has to do with the tuning(timing, fuel, boost). Old tuners like Smarty compounded this issue with dangerous tunes that would pop head gaskets in short order. So a if you are keeping it stock, I wouldn't worry about it too much.

To answer your question, there is nothing wrong doing them one at a time. Most shops don't like it because it is a liability to them as you said. The want to take the head of and machine it to ensure it has not lifted before they work on it so it has less chance of coming back. Back when I got it done, I paid $600 to shop I usually use on top of the cost of the studs. The was several years ago and I assure hourly rates have risen significantly since then.

 

[HEMIMANN]

Supposedly, Cummins caving-in to the torque-to-yield fad would fix some of this with guys not having calibrated torque wrenches, etc. I don't know if it did, I just remember when that method came out while I worked for Cummins and I was astonished. I was one of the guys designing critical load path bolted joints and specifying clamp loads with sufficient overload margins.