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| Replace Head Gasket or Use Sealant?; Leak...Head Gasket | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jul 11 2017, 01:10 PM (1,724 Views) | |
| monzanut | Jul 14 2017, 08:15 AM Post #31 |
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Drip under Pressure
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I would not trust that shop with my car (okay, I don't trust any shop with my car, lol). Just had similar issue happen to one of my boys down in Idaho. 98 Accord blows smoke whenever he accelerates really bad, took it to the shop there and guy told him that head gasket is bad and will be about $1200 to fix (4cyl V-tec). Car has 240k on it and still on original automatic, so I told him probably junk. Went down for his wedding and looked at it and found that the top tank on the radiator was split about 4", every time you rev engine (newer water pump from when I did timing), coolant flow was enough to spray out crack onto exhaust manifold which is in front of the motor, thus giving him the Bond smoke screen. Went and got him a new radiator for $45 on Amazon, got it the next day and took half hour to swap. Runs great now. There are so many ASE certed mechanics out there today that almost solely rely on their damn code reader they got off the snap-on truck to tell them what is wrong that when they try to do a visual, they can't even interpret what their eyes are seeing. When I ran a weekend shop down in Cali, I would charge $50/hr when other shops charged $80-$110/hr...I usually could only do a third of the jobs that would come to me since it was just me in the shop and people didn't care. They would wait for weeks till I had time to do the job rather than go to these other places that would just shaft them on most anything. If I didn't have a blown up disk, I probably would still run a shop instead of play with electrical, lol. |
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| Richard123vmt | Jul 14 2017, 03:31 PM Post #32 |
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Jelly is right. The cylinders are surrounded by the cooling jacket so any compression leak would go into the coolant. An external leak could only be oil or water. Unless the head is cracked. Get a second and third opinion--if you can stand that many grease monkies! (Joke joke.) Edited by Richard123vmt, Jul 14 2017, 03:55 PM.
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| jazzmandolin | Sep 11 2017, 10:35 PM Post #33 |
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I know I will get reamed for this but we really had no choice. It was either this or send to the pick n pull. Wifes 330,000 mile 97 3/5 blew head gasket 100 miles from home. Could not afford the tow fee much less have some shop rip my head off to fix it. SO we had decided to send it to the junk yard. On my way to pick up the wife and dispose of the car I decided to try snake oil. If it did not work no big deal as car was going to junk anyway. Trouble code p0301. When I got to the car she was blowing coolant 3 to 4 feet out the tail pipe with huge white smoke. No coolant in oil. Pulled #1 plug and sure enough drenched in coolant. SO I did the dirty. Went and picked up the BLUE DEVIL pour and go head gasket stop leak and new spark plug. Installed new plug, poured snake oil into radiator, let it idle for a hr per instructions. Smoked like hell and continued to blow and drip coolant for the idle hr. I figured it did not work. SO went picked up wife from hotel went back to car. Check coolant and was only slightly low topped it off. Started her up still just a little smoke. Took off for the 100 mile drive home. Wife was following and said the car smoked at first and that she watched it slowly go away. SO I drove this car normal on the way home. 65 and 70 mile per hr some stop and go through town and a 10 minute stop a construction one way. No smoke no over heating. I know this fix in a bottle is NOT the best way to go. The car is in the driveway rather than the junk yard, guess we will see how long it lasts. I am amazed I did not expect the stuff to work at all! |
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| ptcapboy | Sep 12 2017, 06:11 AM Post #34 |
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hey you kept your car out of the junkyard no reaming from me-just kudos- |
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| freegeo | Sep 12 2017, 08:15 AM Post #35 |
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What kind of a rebuild did it get 25,000 miles ago? |
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| jazzmandolin | Sep 12 2017, 09:00 AM Post #36 |
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Complete rebuild including head by a fella out in North Carolina that builds G10 engines for his kit airplanes. He dropped one in he had ready to go. 1500.00 out the door labbor and everything. This was at 270,000 miles so we have 60,000 on the repuild this was about 6 yrs ago. Motor ia great and uses no oil between changes. We had issues with losing coolant when I had a buddy drive to Cali from Virgina. Got hotter than I would have liked and stressed the head i assume as it has not run as smooth after the initial lose of coolant and high temp. Did compression test but readings were all over the place I was not doing it right or cheap guage was crap. So i cant tell ya the numbers. I am pretty sure we have a burnt valve. Anyway we are pretty much done putting money into it and will probably drive till it drops and then move it on. |
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| Dystopiate666 | Sep 13 2017, 02:42 AM Post #37 |
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Tree Banger
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Please update this post when the car finally bites the bullet, I am very curious to see how long the snake oil can hold it. |
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| jazzmandolin | Sep 16 2017, 07:06 AM Post #38 |
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The car has been retired to a grocery getter. Will probably not be driven more than 20 miles from home going forward. I expect the band aide fix could last a good while not being driven much. I had tried to rent the wife a car for her drives away from town as I suspected a break down was coming. SHE absolutely refused saying there was nothing wrong with her car. Well now she agrees with the local only designation and need to use a rental for out of town car travel. I will update here from time to time. |
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| freegeo | Sep 16 2017, 10:01 AM Post #39 |
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That's better than the grave yard. |
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| cwatkin | Sep 21 2017, 12:14 PM Post #40 |
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I know someone who got like 100,000 miles on a "fix in a bottle". I wouldn't suggest it but apparently it can work. It was still running when he sold it or traded it as well. I also know a guy that lost his job and was given a car to put around town. The catch was that the car had a bad head gasket so he used a "fix in a bottle". It worked for a while. He got a job and was mainly using the car to go back and forth to work. The transmission was starting to get iffy as well and the head gasket finally started to leak again so the car was missing and burning coolant. He traded it in on something new and got like $500 out of it in trade so dumped it. In this case the "fix in the bottle" worked long enough for him to be making some money and replace the car. It was some crappy old Dodge Spirit or Plymouth Acclaim so no big loss. As for when you decide to tear it down and do it right, the fix in the bottle can gum stuff up and make it more difficult. Stop leak type products can plug up radiators and cooling passages. That is the big negative here. Conor |
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| suzukitom | Sep 21 2017, 12:49 PM Post #41 |
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Tom
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When I was a kid and had to walk to school on a residential street route (5 miles uphill both ways), we were always passed by an old gardener slowly driving his 64 Falcon station wagon loaded with his gear.. and with 4, maybe 5 of its 6 cylinders firing. As we got older, that car got slower, and sometimes we had to walk a little faster to get ahead of the smoke. Thankfully we had a little warning that it was coming since it sounded like a sprinkler... putt.... putt putt..putt.....putt To this day I am amazed how long that car kept running in that condition. It looked like this one.. ![]() Edited by suzukitom, Sep 21 2017, 01:04 PM.
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| cwatkin | Sep 21 2017, 10:57 PM Post #42 |
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I have been around a few of those cars that could barely pull a hill. An ex-gf (luckily never married) of mine and her husband at that time had this V6 S-10 pickup. I have one as well so was amazed when the thing had no power. Then it hit a hill and was huffing and puffing. The light at the top of the hill turned red and they all started complaining about how they weren't going to make it when it turned green. I was like what are you talking about? It turned green and the guy floored it and it just sat there misfiring and popping. There wasn't enough power to engage the torque converter to get the thing rolling on a gradual hill. Luckily there was no traffic so we backed up to the next street and took the long way around the light to avoid any hills. The thing was just huffing, puffing, and popping the whole time. I told them $150 in plugs, wires, distributor, and a coil would probably fix it and that I would do the work. They said "We don't have the money." I said "You are burning that much extra gas a week with this thing running how it is." That didn't seem to matter to them. Then they hit the brakes are all you heard was metal on metal. A few months later they called me and wondered if I wanted to buy the truck for parts as I they knew I had a similar model. I was hoping it had just quit running and that I could give them a few hundred dollars, get the title, fix it onsite, and drive away. Well,, they had crashed it because the brakes failed and it was totaled. It was drivable but bent in half and definitely not road worthy. To top it off they had done a "payday loan" on it and quit paying on it once it was wrecked. The loan company came to repo it and left in a huff when they pointed to the junk truck in the yard. They didn't bother to repo it. So, they wanted to sell it to me as junk with no title. I passed since I didn't have any projects that needed the parts. Then when I ran cross country in high school I went to this two week long camp at one of our state universities. There was a construction site we would run by and often this one truck would be starting up and driving. It was one those where you could see as much daylight shining through as their was metal. I swear that HALF this truck was simply missing and had just rusted away. I don't know if it would have been possible to put anything in the bed without it falling through. It was probably one of those with no floorboards and such. I wish I had some pictures of the thing. The remains of the body panels were just flapping in the wind. It would start up with a roar and immediately be surrounded by a thick cloud of smoke. Sometimes it would drive by us and hit a hill. The smoke was just terrible and the engine must have had no compression as it would just slow to a crawl and barely make it over the hill in a low gear. Everyone there was amazed it was still running. It didn't miss but just had no power and burned oil like an oil farting Geo Metro all the time. Towards the end of the camp we were all out running along a main road and the truck passed by. There was no smoke this time because it was on the back of a flatbed trailer being transported somewhere, hopefully to the scrap yard. We all got a good laugh out of this after seeing it running and in such terrible shape for several days. Conor |
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| jazzmandolin | Oct 7 2017, 04:35 AM Post #43 |
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Our gasket in a bottle fix is still working. Go figure. Around a thousand miles in. I sure did not think it would work. Passed Cal smog yesterday so evidently it did not mess with the emissions in anyway. Still have heat so it has not clogged up the heater core. Car is running really good! Pretty amazed! Blue Devil Pour-n-Go head gasket sealer. Hail Mary pass for the win. LoL |
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| ptcapboy | Oct 7 2017, 06:16 AM Post #44 |
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that's amazing-kudos to blue devil |
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