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The results are in... exhaust gas test turned yellow pretty quick. I'm not happy. Looking for next steps to determine solution. I assume a compression test is in order, but hoping you guys can help me get a game plan together, as i may be out of my league on this one.
Yeah... I had a feeling this might happen at some point, but was hoping to get a few more years out of it before I put it out to pasture. Its such a beautiful vehicle. It never over-heated on me, always ran great. However, I bought it knowing it previously had an engine failure, which was most likely caused by coolant loss and resulted in an overheat. Engine was repaired with one new head, timing chains, cooling system parts, catalytic converters, etc. I knew it was a gamble... and, ultimately, it didn't work out. Win some, lose some.
Thats good to hear. Curious where you are seeing those prices. I was looking around and most remans were between $10-13K for the engine only.
Legit question... and my logic is basically that if the head has a crack and no coolant has degraded the oil, then it is less likely that there are deeper engine problems caused by the engine running with degraded oil. This helps me rationalize the idea of repairing the engine instead of replacing or selling for parts.I'm kind of curious what you mean by "just" a cracked head? I would prefer the blown head gasket, personally.
My limited experience with both indicates that it's very hard to tell the difference between the two until you get the head off the block. Even then, you only can eliminate one (the cracked head) as the culprit. I had a Unimog engine where I kept getting oil in the coolant, and I never did figure out what the source was. I imagine it was a block defect somewhere in the high-pressure part of the oil galleys.
Anyway, no coolant in the oil might just be a sign of how small the leak is currently. As it grows, you might start to see more evidence of coolant in the crankcase. A compression or leakdown test might help identify what bank the issue is in, and possibly even what cylinder.
I'll just throw this out there, probably much to the consternation of many: I had one engine where it was not worth it to me to tear it down and do the repair on the cylinder head. I didn't know whether it was the head gasket or the head itself, and it didn't really matter to me. So I bought some block seal chemical and put it in the coolant, ran it for awhile that way, then flushed the system. That engine ran fine, with no further evidence of leaks, for 30k miles or so. But it was a Toyota, so...it had that going for it.
Didn't realize that should/could be checked with a compression test, but can do that today. I did a dry test, no oil.
