blown head gasket...
Thread Starter
TECH Apprentice
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 330
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blown head gasket... took her to the dealer yesterday for a misfire got a call today and they told me its a blown head gasket on the left bank. They quoted the fix around 1700....seem steep to anyone?...that included changing both head gaskets and sendin the heads out to be checked.
Pull them yourself and spend that money on some upgrades. I just blew a gasket myself, and I pulled the heads in my garage. Now i'm just waitin on all the new parts to arrive. A good gasket set will cost you around $250 and spend the rest on cam and springs maybe.
Im sure the dealership wont be using cometics... you could probably pull the heads yourself for 60 bucks in head and waterpump gaskets and headbolts. It does take a while though. Probably 15+ hours for a first timer... well, for doing the set anyway. You could easily do a set of heads and cam and possibly squeeze a tune in there for that price.
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Did the car overheat? Usually a headgasket blows due to overheating. Do you spray the car? The only other thing I could think of is the coolant got degraded enough to cause damage to the gasket. I would do a pressure test on the cooling system before you take it apart and see if it shows a loss of pressure which could indicate a leak.
Thread Starter
TECH Apprentice
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 330
Likes: 0
car did not overheat, this is why i cant figure out how it could be a head gasket. When i put the car into storage everything was fine....now its not...showin a misfire on the 4th and 5th cyl. the dealership told me that the left bank head gasket could be blown, causing number 5 to miss, and the number 5 missing causes number 4 to miss...does this make sense to anyone?....what is the firing order on these?
Number 4 and 5 are not even on the same side of the motor nor are they sister pistons. I feel you may have someother issue causing your miss. Like I said do a pressure test on the cooling system and also pull the plugs and do a compression and leak down test. Is it a dead miss that you feel all the time or is it a miss that comes and goes or happens under load. Who knows it could even be something like a plugged injector from the car sitting, it should not happen but it could.
Staging Lane
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 67
Likes: 0
From: Rockland County, NY
A misfire should set an engine code. If you know someone with a scanner, or go to autozone, find out what codes are set. If it's only misfiring one cylinder, check the easy stuff like coil, plug, injector, etc. before pulling everything apart assuming it's the head gasket. I agree, pressure test it, find out if the cooling system has a leak. usually if it has a leak it will over heat quickly as it can't build enough pressure to keep the boiling point down.
Be careful also cause the temp guage in your car is a dummy. It might be overheating and you might not even know. I had a blown headgasket and went to tune the car and it showed up on the tuners labtop that my car was not at normal temp. If you had a blown headgasket you'll definately see a leak.
On The Tree
Joined: Oct 2005
Posts: 160
Likes: 0
From: PNW
If you do it yourself, take and get the heads surfaced. Get some gasket cleaner/remover and clean the deck surface with something plastic, and then a soft wire brush. Like brass. Do no use a putty knife or gasket scraper. Also, the permatex gasket remover works great on removing the burnt oil (carbon) off the piston tops. Just be careful becasue the stuff is very caustic. Spray everything with WD40 and wipe off a couple times to clean the gasket remover off. Then I use a wet/vac to suck up the crap around the rings, and any thing that fell off into the water jackets. Try to cover the lifter area up as good as you can, and vaccum it out as well.
