DHC8FO

Well the saga begins:

On my way hone today I noticed that my car was overheating all the way in to the red. I was pulling into my driveway and decided to leave it running so I could put some water into the overflow tank.

Surprise !!

Milkshake is spewing all over. I immediately shut it down and let it sit for afew hours.

While I'm killing time I start to wonder how bad the damage could be on the botton end as I couldn't have driven over 1/4 mi., and I was gentle.

Another surprise

When draining the oil, there was no trace of water mixin in the oli system, not even the cap.

The head gasket has 8k on it, the oil cooler mounting has been leaking oil for some time. I'm hoping that this is where the problem is.

Has anyone had this hapen? If so was it HG or oil cooler?

I'm really hoping that it was the oil cooler, and that because the oil pressure was greater than the water pressure, it forced oil into the water, and disrupted the cooling system causing it to overheat, and all will be better with a simple fix of the gaskets.

35thSLP

sure sounds like the oil cooler to me! I would check that first. much easier and less expensive.

RedlineMan

You're on it!

Cylinder pressure is higher than oil pressure, and oil pressure is higher than cooling system pressure, as you have factored. No water in oil is not a HG. Oil in water is almost always a cooler seal. All very logical, for what that is worth with a car.

I'm a little surprised it overheated, though...

DHC8FO

I understand there is an allignmet tool for the gasket. Had a sapare gasket on hand, but not the tool. Has anyone had any luck without the tool? Otherwise I'm stuck until July 5th.

Tom M'Guinn

Overheating and spewing point to a leaking HG. Clean oil points to oil seals. So.... hard to say. Was the coolant super-saturated with oil? That might explain the over-heating if it got too foamy or gummy to flow. Needless to say, you should shut down the car when it overheats into the red. I've had both problems. When my HG went, there was little doubt -- it steam cleaned a spark plug, had coolant in the oil (but no oil in coolant), had wet plugs and a lumpy idle, overheated under load, even started spitting coolant out the tail-pipe. When my oil seals went bad, the only symptom was oil in the coolant. Since you need to do the seals to fix your oil leak, you might as well do that first and see if the problem is cured. My write up for that is here:

http://members.rennlist.com/tom86951..._seal_repl.htm

cruise98

Tom:

That is an excellent article on the oil cooler seals. Have you submitted that to Paragon?

Tom M'Guinn

The alignment took is for the oil pressure valve. If you have a one piece valve, then you can probably get away with using the valve to align the housing.

Cruise: thanks, and no I have not. Does paragon want tech articles?

DHC8FO

Thanks for the link to your article, I've started to remove, and I think the cooling problem was a combination of low speed (stop and go) and the coolant becomming the consistancy of honey as the oil was forced into the coolant causing it to retain heat (as oil would do). No eviddence of HG failure yet, but I have not pulled plugs. It drove normally with no loss of power, but I was not getting on it. I'll keep you updated.

DHC8FO

Finnally got done and ran car. It was an oil seal. I got lucky! It was a real pain to flush out all the oil from the cooling system, but I think I got almost all of it.