BMW M3 E30 separate head gasket

Reinforced cylinder head gasket BMW M3 E30 – S14

This is a separate-ring gasket, the only true reinforced gasket. (see bottom of the article)

Developed for the M3 E30 Group A.
We make these gaskets to measure, with bore and thickness on request.

Ideal for making a standard engine more reliable, or as part of a big build

Price delivered

Regarding cylinder head gaskets, there are really 4 types of gasket:

The crimped-ring gasket, meaning the ring "holds" within the gasket; it is made of steel, even stainless steel. Originally this ring is a tube crushed to be crimped under pressure, its thickness is around 1/10mm. In tuned engines, i.e. engines under high stress, it is often these fire rings that break… this can be fine for a standard engine, but as soon as you want to do something serious it is better to move on to something else.
You see some of these gaskets covered with a layer of stainless steel top and bottom, but the base of the gasket is still a standard gasket.

The multi-layer (multi layer gasket) is a set of stacked metal sheets riveted together. With this type of gasket the block waviness must be less than 10µm over more than 8mm and the roughness must be less than 15µm… The absence of a fire ring on this type of gasket often leads to reliability problems on tuned engines.

The third type is the O-ring; the O-ring requires machining of the block and the cylinder head in order to fit a cylindrical wire as a fire ring. The problem with this type of gasket is that the modification is irreversible; once the block and head are machined there is no going back. The ring wire is much thinner than on a separate-ring gasket.

The fourth type is the separate ring; the advantage of this kind of gasket is that the fire ring is machined from solid. This ring is on average 20 times thicker than a crimped ring. Unlike the O-ring setup it requires no machining of the block or the head; the ring is designed to fit in place like a standard gasket. It is a very strong stainless steel ring that withstands very, very high turbo pressures, above 2.5 bar. The fibre is covered, like a standard gasket, with a silicone bead to absorb the machining imperfections of the block. One last very interesting point is the made-to-measure aspect: we manufacture the gaskets on request with bores to 1/10 of a millimetre and thickness on request