Has anyone seen this before? (how the gasket is streched)

I don't think I forced the gaskets like that to rip it, its odd how the hole is elongated. Right now I can only think of heat expansion causing this. They were felpro gaskets too!

 

Stretched hell, it looks broke.

May want to check the intake, it may not be true.

 

that's pretty damn weird.

Test for flatness of contact surfaces with a straightedge
if they're all fine then I'd try a fresh FelPro gasket

 

Very interesting...

I doubt it heat expansion, If everything expanded enough to rip that gasket apart you would have alot more problems.

 

Looks like the inside of my old 305. Id say either the gasket surfaces arnt true, or it was overtorqued, causing excessive crush. It could also have been damaged during installation as well.

 

Had a similiar thing happen to mine. Was thread sealant used when the manifold was installed? We surmised that with mine there wasn't and I had coolant running out the exhaust. My gaskets looked even worse when we pulled mine.

 

Its hard to tell from the pic but are these not the type that has the metal sheet running through the middle?

 

I guess I over torqued it. I am not that big of a guy and I used a little 10mm wrench that is about 5in long. Who knows, but whatever, I wanted to upgrade the rotating assembly before a catastrophic failure and also ,I had put the engine together even though I should have sleeved a cylinder cause it had pits in the wall and now I can do that. Eh, I just wanted to blame felpro