The thing most of us call the 'head gasket'- the rubber gasket between the
head and the outer case- doesn't have anything to do with compression per se
as it would in a 'normal' engine.

You could still have normal compression if that gasket was gone altogether.

Cya,
Robert

> My main question at this point is,  do the following cylinder
> compression tests ( and plug inspections) definitively point to a leaky
> head gasket