what do stock 1.7l pistons on 1972 engine look like? Options

[jdlmodelt]

I pulled the head off of one side of my 1972 1.7l engine tonight and found dome top pistons/cylinders. They looked to have maybe 50% of life left. It also had the head "gasket" rings. The passenger side retainer wire was broke and the push rods had some wear on them, a scoring about 1/2 in long on all of them about 3/4 up the push rod on the head end. There was almost no noticable cylinder ridge wear. I haven't removed the valves yet but I can tell by looking at the edges of them that the wear is minimal. This may have been rebuilt 20k to 50k miles ago?

Question. Were the stock 1.7l engines dome top pistons? I guess I need to measure bore and stroke to determine what size pistons/cylinders are in this engine?
thanks,
James

[nathansnathan]

The EA engines did have domed pistons as did the W as both are supposed to have 8.2:1 CR. The dished pistons that were in the EB California engines brought it down to 7.3:1, same as a bus. Looking at the compression ratios at the tunacan site, it seems there are only 2 builds for 914's (dished and domed), but there is a 3rd CR for 69-70 411's, a Z engine that had CR in between at 7.8:1 - could be that was the flat pistons.

http://www.tunacan.net/t4/reference/case.htm

About the head gaskets, I believe the bulletin that said to take them out was referencing 2.0 engines only, so it is debatable whether it is advisable on a 1.7 or 1.8. If you do it by the factory instructions, you put a shim at the base of the cylinder that ends up thicker than the original cylinder base shim and the head gasket and the paper gasket combined, effectively raising deck height by .023" and reducing compression/performance.

I have run no head gasket without adding the base shims, as long as you are comfortable with your deck height.

http://www.ratwell.com/mirror/www.dolphins...m/techbull.html

Here's bus guru, Richard Atwell's page discussing it, down under "head gasket"
http://www.ratwell.com/technical/Heads.html