Head gasket question

[weargle]

I'm crossposting this on CEG.

It appears that the head gasket for the 3L block (I'm using the 04 Escape block with 3L PnP heads) blocks off four potential coolant passage areas per side. The passages in question are one each on the intake side and flywheel side on cylinder 3 and one each on the exhaust side and accessory side of cylinder 1. This is mirrored on #6 and #4 on the right hand side.

Is there any reason for this? Not that I'm eager to out-engineer a degreed Ford engineer and go wantonly punching holes in a head gasket, but ideas would be appreciated as to why this is so.

So far I've picked the brains of todras and Buckshot, but both of them don't have answers either.

[RodneyBur]

I wondered the same thing on a 3.8 v6 T-bird I was repairing. It had two coolant passages in the front that were blocked off. They were on the bottom of the head and would lead to the block. There were two others in the back that were not blocked. After some careful observation I noticed that the intake flowed coolant into the head on the front (straight from water pump coming from radiator). The heads had two coolant passages on the back that fed the water into the block. That water then went to the front of the block and back to the radiator. This is how the heads cooled. If the blocked passages were open the water would flow from intake (via waterpump/ radiator) through the holes in the front down to the block. The back of the heads would not have proper cooling and would eventually overheat and possibly warping / cracking. What stumps me is the fact that why are these ports even there if they are blocked off? The only thing I could reason is that they are there just in case the baack ports get blocked and this provides the coolant went an alternative escape route. The heads would be ****ed in either case though.

As for the 3.0l I'm sure it is a similar scenario, where they are designed to flow through the total length of the head and to provice maximum cooling effect.

Hope that helps.

[Blackcoog]

It could have just been easier to cast the block with all those passeges. It may have saved Ford money and the fix was to block it at the head gasket.