Leaky heads ?? Options

[TonyAKAVW]

I dropped my1.8L engine recently to try to take care of a bad oil leak I've had recently. In the process of removing things off the engine to find the leak, I discovered a black deposit at the seam of the head and each cylinder. Is this deposit something I should worry about? I'm not really planning on keeping this engine long term, but I'd like to know if its on the brink of disaster or whether this is okay.

[TonyAKAVW]

Oh another silly thing I forgot to mention about the car... I'm an electrical engineer and of course this means that anything that can be made more electronic, will be made more so....

The turn signals have been replaced by large arrays of LEDs. Each Front turn signal has I think 100 amber LEDs and the rears have 50 or so red LEDs each. I had to build a special flasher circuit, since they draw far less current than light bulbs. So this flasher circuit allows me to vary the rate of flashing from very slow ( once per second) to strobe light speeds, and since they are LEDs, they actually respond that fast (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I do however leave them at a normal rate unless I'm showing it off to friends. One friend called it the Party Porsche (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Its silly, but hey, what can I say, I'm a geek.

-Tony