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Sorry to hear about that. I believe there are only two possible reasons for your head gasket to blow: too much cylinder pressure (at 12 psi I would rule that out), or too much heat in the cylinder caused by a lean condition...there are multiple possible causes of you car going lean. You could have a faulty fuel pressure regulator, a bad pump, a disconnected/leaking line to the regulator, a bad fuel pump control module ( I think that's what it's called, it increases voltage to the fuel pump as the engine air flow increases), or the program could be lean. Unfortunately, when a car goes lean it does'nt always have audible detonation, usually but not always. One more (somewhat remote) possibility is with our shitty 91 octane gas in Ca. your car could have detonated even at 12 psi, I doubt it. I don't know about your budget but you could pull the engine and just replace the head gaskets (a bit of a shame for all that labor and not freshen up the engine), you could roll the dice and get a used engine ( I guess that's where the j-spec comes in; I don't know how much sucess people have had with buying used engines...ask around). Having blown mine in a similar way in 1998, I opted for a new Nissan short block and have 120K pretty hard miles on it. One other option is to have yours rebuilt by a COMPETENT shop, that should be alot less $$ than a short block from Nissan, I believe they go for around $3500 these days. Good luck in whatever you decide. Mark
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