MY03, 80k miles, no mods

My car recently overheated due to a crack in the coolant hose feeding the oil catch can. I duct taped the crack, filled it with coolant, and was able to drive the car home which was ~2min away. It seemed to drive fine but the temperature still went up but never touched red. However, now i am unable to start the car. The engine cranks, and it almost caught a few times but no go.

I've tried replacing the spark plugs but that did not help.

I performed a compression test and got ~150psi in 3 cylinders and 210psi in cylinder #4. Compression test was performed cold with all spark plugs removed.

I didn't notice any milky texture in the oil dipstick. Spark plugs didn't smell like coolant. no CEL's.

Car rode fine prior to this with sometimes rough idle without the AC on.. but this seems to be common for these cars.

Sounds like a blown head gasket to me, possibly have caught it before anything major warped but with my limited knowledge I may be misdiagnosing.

Can anyone confirm before i start ordering parts for a head gasket replacement.

Thanks!

 

Do you remember how many bars you saw display on the coolant gauge?

 

Id stick a camera and or light down in the spark plug holes and look at the tops of pistons and sidewalls for any sign of coolant/moisture next. If it is a blown HG, you could get lucky and only need to replace the HG, or not if you possibly scored some cylinders from running with coolant washing the cylinder walls.

 

it hit right before the red bar for a few seconds while i was at a stop light. after that it stayed 2 bars before red.

 

I took a look down the spark plug holes and it looks like there is some moisture but mostly looked like sludge. If im not mistaken, the cylinder heads should look clean from coolant sloshing around.

 

Anything over 250+ you warped the head most likely and causing a HG leak. I would remove the head, send it to a quality machine shop to get it flattened, with the proper RA finish, throw some ARP head studs while your at it, and throw a fresh HG on it.

Also while your in there you can check the cyl walls for scoring.

 

Good of a time as any to buy yourself a cheap endoscope, I've wanted one for awhile myself. Times like these I always think how nice it would be to be able to feed a camera into small places like the cylinder heads but then I never think about it when the need passes.

Aside from the usual checking for bubbles where you fill coolant and for blowback at the coil cap, not much else I can think of. Cylinder heads should be dry though, for sure.

 

Don't buy too cheap though: I bought one for about $50 and it's not all that useful. Video quality is too low to spot issues unless they are very obvious.

 

**** me, 50$ is about as much as I'd be willing to pay, not much more haha. I must ask though, how old is yours? Phones have accelerated tech and have make higher quality cams cheaper every year.

I'll def have to pay careful attention to specifications in my consideration.

 

You can see a fair bit inside the cylinder through the spark plug tubes and shining a light. I got to think this would be enough to the keen eye to see coolant if there.

Blown head gasket or not, the engine should try and fire so im not sure what to think about this, unless you have cylinders that are/were saturated in coolant and has initially fouled the plugs and continuing to foul your plugs as there is still coolant present in most/all cylinders. It would have to be a pretty catastrophic breach in HG to cause no firing at all though do to ignition/fouling. This much coolant in cylinders should be rather apparent on visual inspection with a light.

You might dump the oil and look for signs of coolant that way as well. Fill back up with some cheap standard oil for troubleshooting purposes.