yes it was a small shop in nc and i had a long term relationship with the owner. $400 was for labor and the head was within specs so it did not require any time in the machine shop.

i was going to do it myself but like you i just couldn't find a large enough block of time to commit to it. i'm not a mechanic but i agree with rueben above that a lot of people could do it themselves.

the longer you wait the worse it will get.

roger

please tell me thats a dohc 3.0l

my engine pictured? thats a SOHC 3.0

well, I have been keeping an eye on the coolant level and over the past 2 days, it has not consumed any..............yet. If there was a damaged head gasket, wouldn't it have consumed some by now? the wife drives it about 2 hours each day on the highway, so thats about 4 hours highway driving and still no coolant consumption.


maybe it was just an air pocket that made the coolant drop?

when it was overheated, my brother shut if off right away, and as a result it pushed lots of coolant out of the overflow tank I am assuming b/c when he shut it off, it stopped the flow of the coolant and it sat on the hot parts of the engine and expanded and boiled it out of the overflow tank????

in any case, there was a lot of coolant that was pushed out of the system, we filled it with water we had on the trip, but I would imagine there was some air in the system.

we have about 4 more days until the weekend, I will keep my eye on the coolant level, if it doesn't consume any, is it safe to say it was an air pocket???

also, with 170k miles, smoke could maybe be engine oil burning??? I do every once in a while have to top off the engine oil, maybe that is the smoke I see????

thanks again for any input.

oh and if the smoke is due to engine oil burning, what is most likely the reason why this type of engine would burn oil? would it be the valve seals or the piston rings or both? it runs well enough for an engine with all the use and abuse it has had, but it got me thinking, when I do the timing belt and water pump on it again, would it be much more labor for them to get at the valve guide seals or valve seals and would that significantly reduce engine oil consumption?

Keep an eye on any contamination between the oil and coolent. I doubt a single overheat toasted your headgaskets. Depending on the angle and the RPMs your engine was running at you could up pumped some oil into the intake through the PCV. My best advice would be just monitor fluids for sudden loss or cross contamination and report back over the next few days. That and take some steps to prevent it from overheating again. 3 core rad, lower temp stat etc etc...

well, I don't normally wheel this old girl anymore, but I did have an additional cooling fan and also a switch to turn on a/c fan, but my bro didn't notice the temp creeping up and never turned them on.

I will keep an eye on it.

I'd have the stealer retorque the head gasket and pray. ANd I'd do a comubstion products test on the coolant first. Kit from Lisle is about $50 to test it.

well, another thing I might add is that when I say overheated, it wasn't in the red, the guage normally sits at the middle between hot and cold, when this happened it was about 2/3 the way up, so above the normal mid point of the guage, but not in the red. maybe I am over reacting and I will just need to keep an eye on coolant level the rest of this week.

if it is just burning oil b/c of high miles, should I have him replace valve guide seals or will that not really help much?

Scottie when does it smoke? First start up? After a long hot idle, pulling away from a red light? I reckon changing the valve guide seals is more work that doing a head gasket.

The work involve in doing the TB change does nothing to help with changing the valve guide seals. The cams don't need to come out of that engine <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/kewl.gif" alt="" />