Fixing a Blown Head Gasket ~ The Right Way

here we have our 99 s10 that we previously diagnosed with a bad head gasket the owner decided to go ahead and make that head gasket repair so that's what we're going to do in this video but thanks to my buddies over at advanced auto parts i got a pretty big surprise in store for them but you'll have to wait to the end for that surprise quick recap we had oil and coolant mixed together we used our combustion leak tester to determine that we do in fact have exhaust gas coming through the coolant which in many cases is a leaking head gasket as a lot of you pointed out in that last video that is not the only way engine oil and engine coolant can mix together oil coolers intake manifold gaskets several other things can cause these two fluids to mix together which of course they are not supposed to be mixed together so if you have oil and coolant mixed together don't just throw a head gasket on it you need to do some diagnosis and while i have replaced many a head gaskets in my career never has one been on a chevy s10 so to be a little bit of a learning experience for everyone and should be a good time i went ahead and drained the engine oil and drained the coolant already we'll go ahead and start by getting some of the easy stuff out of the way like the fan shroud of course disconnect the battery now we have a little bit more room next we'll take the upper fan shroud off this guy out of the way now even though we have plenty of room to work up front here i'm going to take the radiator out for a couple of reasons one well it's super easy to take out and two i don't want to risk anything slipping and hitting this brand new radiator so we're just going to go ahead and lift it up and out of the way then we don't have to worry about it next we will remove the plenum chamber that's attached to the throttle body now that we have a pretty good amount of stuff out of our engine compartment and a whole lot more room to work we need to take off our fan and fan coupler assembly now i thought i had a wrench big enough but [Music] my 32 doesn't fit so what i picked up was this fan clutch kit it has a big two-sided wrench on it so that you can actually drop down on the coupler it also has two different ways to hold the pulley depending on what kind of car you're working on now there are other ways to get these fans off without the proper tool such as holding super tight tension on the belt put a wrench on it and bump the starter to bump those loose i've even seen people take air hammers and air hammer these things off all those ways can work i just really don't like risking destroying this fan setup if we don't have to so what's cool about this tool is it actually has squares in it so you can extend out the effective length of the wrench i'm going to use this piece to hold that pulley into place that means i'm going to have to take one bolt out we're going to thread that bolt back through this hole so the bolt goes through like this and then you use the other bolt to press against it that's going to allow you to press this tool one way while we loosen the fan clutch the other way also be careful sometimes these guys are actually counter-threaded did that come loose that easy it's one of those things where like it did it come loose easy enough holy cow that i can't believe it came off that easy how awesome is that big ups for having the correct tool holy cow y'all that was awesome i also do like to put thicker gloves on that way if something slips you have a little bit of extra protection on your hands next we're going to take our serpentine belt off if this is a car you're not familiar with it's a good idea to document how the serpentine belt was routed i like to draw a series of circles representing each pulley then i'll just draw a line that represents the belt that way i know does the belt go over the pulley or under the pulley and the correct routing for it in a perfect world you would just remember how it went but as we all know sometimes it's not a perfect world so having that little bit of extra security is almost always worth the time i went ahead and took the water pump off and the pulleys got the ac compressor moved out of the way to give us a little more room looks like we're gonna have to take this whole accessory bracket off the front including removing the power steering pump and the alternator from said bracket and getting this thermostat housing and hard coolant pipe out of the way so let's do that next we're gonna get the power steering pump just move to the side three bolts in the front you can rotate the pulley and that'll expose where the bolts are the three in the front and two in the back and after that we can go ahead and get the bracket out of the way as well next let's take the accessory bracket off the front now it looks like one of these two alternator bolts actually comes in from the back side so we may try and leave that and just take this bracket and move it over to the side so we don't have to take it all the way out of the car i may change my mind on that one but we'll see oh that's heavy next we're going to get our spark plug wires back through the manifold and let those hang down by our ignition coil pack even though we may not need to i'm going to go ahead and take the throttle body off and just give us a little bit more space i'll also probably go ahead and clean it because we're kind of right here and it looks pretty dirty and look at how grimy this valve cover is next i'm going to disconnect the fuel lines now for the fuel line that's on kind of the outside of the intake manifold there's a really cool little special release tool this is a whole kit to do an assortment of different sizes of fuel lines all you do though is you take this little tool you put it over the fuel line you slide it into the wider part in this case this is going to be our other side of the fuel line that compresses a spring and you can slide it apart i think i'm going to leave the intake manifold on the cylinder head and take the two off together you could probably do that with the exhaust manifold as well leave both manifolds on and take them off with the cylinder head of course that's going to add some weight for the cylinder head but it may be easier than fighting dealing with them inside the car and i'm actually somehow weirdly looks like i'm missing an exhaust stud no idea how the heck that happens so we'll have to source that hopefully i can run down to advance yet again and grab one of these before we can remove the cylinder head though we're gonna need to take the valve cover off there is so much yuck on top of this valve cover i'm gonna clean a little bit of this off even though we're taking the head off and we're gonna have all these parts off the car the less debris that i have to worry about getting into the engine i think the better off we're going to be there's a handful of bolts holding the valve cover on one of the bolts on the passenger side has a bracket that a wire connector attaches to and the one in the back on the driver's side is actually a stud that the nuts supposed to come off but for me the whole stud came out that's not a big deal now we can go ahead and get the valve cover off oh man look oh geez you know the further we get into this the more concerned i actually get about this engine there's a lot of oil and coolant mixed up at the top side look at the underside of this valve cover this is pretty pretty nasty definitely not at all in any way what you really want to see when you pull a valve cover off next let's get all four spark plugs out and what we're gonna have to do is we're gonna have to rotate the engine around and take our rockers and push rods out yep i said push rods on a four-cylinder engine which is kind of hilarious given that this is a 99 and it's not that old the repair manual recommends to rotate the engine around and take the rockers and push rods out when the piston is at tdc so what we can do is we can drop a straw or something down in the spark plug well rotate the engine around with a crankshaft pulley and when the straw goes all the way up to the top we know we're at tdc in addition to that it's not a bad idea to give the rocker a little wiggle back and forth if you find that it doesn't move when you wiggle it that means it's under tension and you probably want to keep rotating the engine around if there's play and it wiggles a little bit then you're good to go ahead and take it off since we are going to be reusing the rockers and the push rods it's going to be really important that we stay organized i'm going to clean these up just a little bit with some brake parts cleaner and then go ahead and label each one of them with a paint marker now it doesn't matter which order that you do these in i'm just going to label them one through eight starting at the front of the engine and working my way back for the push rods i'm going to pull them out in order and poke them through a cardboard box to make sure that one they all stay together and two that they all go back where they came from now it is super important to make sure that you stay organized how you choose to do that is really up to you and this is just one way to do it so hey down in the comments let me know what your favorite way is to stay organized look at this oil coolant mixture on the bottom of this push rod that is not awesome next we're going to unbolt our cylinder head the repair manual says loosen the bolts one quarter turn at a time until you can loosen them by hand typically when we're working on a cylinder head or any kind of engine components we loosen from the outside in and we tighten from the inside out this doesn't specify which is which get our bolts out now if you are reusing these bolts they recommend to keep them in order so they go back where they came from i ordered some new bolts so not something i'm going to worry too terribly much about bolts weren't that expensive and a little bit of a safety measure to go ahead and replace them all right all of our bolts are out our head is loose now you want to take a quick minute and make sure that nothing is connected nothing's plugged in nothing's going to get hung up on our cylinder head or our intake manifold or if you left the exhaust manifold on our exhaust manifold we're gonna have to pull the head kind of this way up and out or kind of rock it up and back it's also kind of deep in the engine compartment there's about a foot between where the core support is and where the engine currently is i'm gonna get this piece of foam right here set it on the core support in case i need to pause and uh take a break or something so yeah i i guess that is all the things that need to happen so let's uh okay now we should be good to go let's get out of the way that out of the way all right i guess we start the cleanup oh man look at that yuck it's like stalactites that's just the gasket getting eaten away next we need to do some pretty thorough inspections to make sure we don't have damage beyond what we were expecting i actually like to start my inspections on the block side the reason i do that is if we have a crack between say a cooling jacket and an oil passage or a jacket and the cylinder bore itself a damaged cylinder wall a cracked piston any of that kind of stuff we're in a super bad way we have a cracked cylinder head we're not exactly in a good way either but a cylinder head replacement it's not going to be as huge and catastrophic of a deal as if we have to do the block because if we're doing the block we might as well just go ahead and get maybe a new engine or a used engine but i'm going to start with my inspection between the cooling jackets and the oil galleys you'll notice there's not a huge distance between the cooling jacket right here and an oil galley right here this is where our push rods were in this little chamber here so we're going to be doing a thorough inspection all along any of these we're also going to inspect the gasket as well let's try and get some of this nasty stuff out of our coolant jackets this is actually broken down bits of our head gasket if you're not sure if you can get it out without dropping any down a shop vac here while you pick up on it would be a really good idea i think we can all agree that does not belong in our cooling system i'm gonna throw some blue masking tape over our oil galley that way we can take these little bits of gasket and push them right out we don't have to worry about them going down in the oil so i don't see any major issues here from like cracks in the block or anything like that we are going to clean this up and get a straight edge on it just to make sure that we didn't have any warpage of the block let's move over and inspect the cylinder head and the cylinder head gasket and see if we can identify any issues there beyond just a bad cylinder head gasket so these are our four openings for our cylinders we have these holes here these are our bolt holes for our head bolts now these here these openings here are actually not supposed to be this giant opening if we compare that to our other head gasket it's just this tiny little hole for a coolant passage but look at how much of this gasket has just deteriorated over time so clearly this head gasket is in pretty sad sad shape let's see if we can find where the exact problem is we look at this spot right here this is not supposed to be a whole open thing it's a solid piece on the new head gasket so this is a potential area for a problem in fact it yep here's our this is actually our spot so right here is a tiny crack you can actually see it pretty well when i move the head gasket back and forth so this was allowing coolant here which should not have been coming through here to pass through into our oil galley and that's what was causing our oil and our coolant to mix so something as simple as this tiny little crack when it's under a bar bar and a half two bar coolant pressure whatever the coolant pressure in this car is it's going to push coolant past the gasket even though the head's bolted down really tight into our oil and cause it to mix i feel like i got super lucky finding it that fast but just look at this overall condition of this gasket it's one of the reasons why i like multi-layered metal gaskets you don't really get this kind of failure here we have our cylinder head over on the bench i think i'm going to take the intake manifold off okay wow that is a lot of oil on the top of that intake okay well that is uh that is a thing that happened now we can flip our cylinder head so that we see the valve side and a bunch of yuck oil coolant mixture is going to leak out but that's okay we don't want that in there anyway all we're doing now is we're cleaning this in a way that is going to allow us to check and make sure that our head is not warped now that we have kind of a base cleaning done on our cylinder head mating surface we need to check and see if the head is warped and what we're going to use for that is a straight edge and some feeler gauges ideally you would want a straight edge long enough to stretch corner to corner on your cylinder head that way we can check the entire span both across diagonally and across the long way on the cylinder head you're also going to need to refer to the repair manual for your specifications on maximum warpage for this cylinder head it's .004 across the span of the cylinder head or .002 within a six inch span we also want to make sure that we're paying attention to the reason for failure we had oil and coolant mixed together so we want to really check along this surface here we also had coolant getting into the combustion chamber so we want to check between the coolant passages and our combustion chamber i also like to look at any narrow point on the cylinder head so between the cylinders is one really common place we're also gonna use the results that we found on our cylinder head gasket to really do a thorough inspection on a particular spot so that one weird spot that we saw on the head gasket we're going to be focusing on that area we'll kind of go across the cylinder like this and i usually like to get down right at eye level and initially look and shine a flashlight back behind it you can see just a tiny bit of light coming right between the head and our straight edge next what we'll do is we will find the appropriate feeler gauge now i said it was .002 which is not very big i like to start with either one just a little bit above or one just a little bit below if the one above fits we got a problem if the one below doesn't fit then you're good to go now when we go up one size on our feeler gauge unfortunately she slides right under in fact i think we could probably go up another size or two so unfortunately even though i was trying really hard to avoid this situation it looks like we're going to the machine shop but at least the machine shop can mill this whole surface make sure it's perfectly flat also get any leftover gasket material off i'll have them hot tank it as well so that'll get any yuck out of there so uh yeah let's get it prepped and man and take it to the machine let's go ahead and take care of some of those dirty oily parts obviously we don't want to reinstall things that are super dirty and caked up with oil and debris but we also need to make sure we get any of this stuff off the bottom out because there was oil and coolant mixed here on like underside of the valve cover now there's pretty much two different chemicals you can use one being brake cleaner which works really really well especially if we're going to spray it and clean it right away the other one will be a degreaser like this which works really really well especially if you want to spray it let it sit for a while and then come back and clean it of course make sure you're working in a well ventilated area because especially the brake clean has a super strong odor after spraying i like to take an old or a new cheap toothbrush and just start cleaning next up we need to get our block prepared so that we can install our cylinder head when it comes back from the machine shop we of course are gonna need to clean that head gasket mating surface and make sure there's no old gasket material left over i've also got our oil galley taped off and i'm gonna stuff some towels down in our cylinders where the piston is down at the bottom so that we can hopefully get a little less debris inside of our engine but don't worry we're going to get all that stuff cleaned out no matter what scraping the mating surface is pretty straightforward we're just going to try and get all that stuff off and before we put the head gasket on we'll come back and do a final cleaning next we want to clean up the wells where our head bolts thread into this is going to involve doing a couple of different things first of all we'll take some compressed air and blow any old oil or coolant whatever may have gotten down in those bolt holes while we were taking the head off we need to get all that out of there then what we're going to do is we're going to run a thread chaser or if you're really careful you can also use a tap here for this but we don't want to cut new threads we only want to make sure that the threads in the block are nice and clean your head bolts typically should thread in very easily by hand so if there's any debris or any old say thread locker or something like that we need to make sure we clean all that out of there we're gonna do that for each one of the bolt holes blow it out with compressed air run the thread chaser in a couple of times and then blow it out again to make sure that we didn't have any debris left in that hole finally we're going to clean and lubricate the cylinder walls of our engine this is going to involve some oil on a rag and simply wiping the cylinders out this would be a good opportunity to check to make sure there's no debris left over from say the head gasket if there is you want to use either vacuum or some compressed air and blow it out of the cylinder not down into the ring so you definitely need to be careful here we're going to do that for all four cylinders of course rotating the engine around to make sure that we can get the tops and the bottoms of each also if you want to clean the tops of the pistons this is not a boost application or anything like that but it's not a bad idea while you're in there to go ahead and give it that extra little bit of cleaning i also went ahead and pulled the lifters out of this engine to clean those and re-lubricate them get any of that oil coolant mixture out of every place i could easily reach before putting the head gasket on we want to make sure that that mating surface is clean and dry we may have dripped some oil on it while we were lubricating the cylinders or some of that coolant mess from maybe blowing out the bolt holes some acetone on a rag wipe that down get it nice and clean and dry you really do want these to be oil free unless otherwise instructed by the repair manual and finally we can line our gasket up in this case our head gasket has the word up written on the side that should face up i've seen this go both ways where sometimes gaskets are really easy to install and it's crystal clear which way they go and sometimes they fit both ways so definitely make sure you take an extra second or two to look at the head gasket and be sure you're installing it the correct way an upside down or backwards head gasket can lead to all the same problems that we already had on this engine we are back from the machine shop and boy that didn't go as well as i had planned okay so i took the head over to the machine shop for them to clean it because as you saw super duper dirty and they can't nil it or resurface the gasket mating surface without cleaning it makes sense no problem go ahead and clean it well he calls me the next morning and says hey charles unfortunately we found out that the cylinder head is cracked ugh i drove up there to take a look at it i want to see what it looks like and you know i was i was really beating myself up about about missing this crack of course the head was super dirty but i was like dude you should have just cleaned it like you just saw the crack i got there i don't know that i would have seen this crack okay right here along the exhaust side where cylinder one spark plug is is the crack you can kind of see it in the video but not really super well so george tells me charles i can try and fix it weld it up sand it down refinish the exhaust uh gasket mating surface where the exhaust ports are and hope for the best he's like i got pretty good success but i just got to let you know it might not work so 100 dice roll figure 100 plus the pressure check plus the cleaning it's cheaper than buying a used cylinder head or a new engine or any of that so luckily he was able to fix it they took a little bit off of the bottom it looks pretty awesome here you can kind of see unfortunately the guy that machined it was not the guy that i talked to so he wasn't sure exactly how much he took off so you're probably wondering charles they took an unknown amount out what happens what do i do if that happens to me well ideally you know how much they take off this is an important question to ask the machine shop hey when you do this work whether it's milling the block or milling the head can you document how much you remove and they all pretty much do i'm gonna go ahead and put the head gasket back on this is a pretty thick head gasket on this s10 so i'm not super worried about that we got everything else ready to go i'm also going to thread chase the spark plug holes it's something i have the head out it's an easy thing to do we'll go ahead and do that as well next we need to get the rest of our gasket surfaces on our cylinder head prepped and ready to go this is going to include scraping and cleaning up where our intake manifold mounts up they've refinished the exhaust manifold side so we don't need to worry about that same thing with the bottom where the cylinder head gasket goes we're good there we are going to need to clean up the thermostat housing mating surface in addition to that similar to how we did the bolt holes on the block i'm going to blow out and clean out the bolt holes where our valve cover mounts up we need to make sure that those bolt holes are clean and free of any liquid or anything like that because we surely don't want to damage our cylinder head when we torque down our valve cover got our intake manifold cleaned up we're going to go ahead and put this back on the cylinder head before we put it on the car i think that's going to make our life a little bit easier but we do need to put a new gasket on this is kind of a cool gasket here now this gasket is actually keyed there's a triangle piece on the gasket here that matches up to one here on this would be the front side of the intake manifold so we'll start there make sure that manifold gasket is in there nice and snug we can get our cylinder head and drop our manifold back on and go ahead and tighten that down next up it's time to install our cylinder head now a couple of things before you do that one you want to install the gasket and make sure that it is properly seated a lot of times either the head side or the block side will have these alignment pins make sure that the gasket sits on those properly what you can also do is you can actually make your own alignment guide pin this is a cylinder head bolt that i cut the head off then i ground a little slot so that we could loosen it with a flat blade screwdriver and what you would do is you would thread this into an old bolt hole don't thread it down very much just enough to get it started then when we take our cylinder head we can slide it straight down onto the block we don't have to worry about sliding it all around make sure all your surfaces are clean including the head and the block and the gasket everybody's happy now let's put this cylinder head on let's go ahead and get our bolts started get that step out of the way i did get new bolts for this i usually like to take a small impact gun or something and just snug these down but i always always always start them by hand now i am not a super stickler about twerking every single fastener on the car there are some things that you just don't need to get a torque wrench out for however these cylinder head bolts are one you definitely need to get a torque wrench out for not only do you want to make sure you tighten them down properly you want to make sure that you follow the sequence recommended in the repair manual that sequence is typically working your way inside out going usually across the cylinder head whatever it is though you need to make sure you follow that torque sequence doing a cylinder head gasket or other work similar is not a job you want to just try and wing it you really really want to have the repair manual for so you can make sure you do it the right way and these are torqued to 46 pound-feet of torque for the longer bolts the ones under the valve cover 43 pound-feet of torque for the shorter ones that are next to where the spark plugs go after that we're going gonna tighten them an additional 90 degrees when you're doing that final tightening of the bolt in our case that extra 90 degrees if it's a pretty easy number to eyeball 90 degrees 180 degrees 360 degrees then i'll usually just put a small mark on the bolt now if it's something odd like 70 degrees or 50 degrees or something like that then i'll go ahead and break out the torque angle wrench next up it's time to start getting our push rods which is weird that we're dealing with push rods but whatever our push rods and our rockers cleaned up and reinstalled now of course we're going to install these back where they came from but we want to spend a minute or two cleaning some of the yuck off of the push rods and off the rockers for the push rods we'll just get some brake cleaner on a rag clean them up not a bad idea to look through the center hole and make sure that you can see light through it you can also take some compressed air and blow that through so we'll get these cleaned up and we can actually just drop these right back in where they came from once they're clean next we're going to get our rockers cleaned up we'll start with a tray of fresh clean engine oil and we'll use that clean engine oil to clean our rockers the key here is we want to get as much good clean oil into the rollers as we possibly can so we'll get it good and saturated take our toothbrush scrub it out as best we can then what we can do is take some compressed air and blow the bearing out this should get rid of any old coolant oil mixture that we have this is also going to leave these really nice and lubricated for when we install them next we're going to install our push rods or push tubes if you prefer to call them that these are going to of course go back in the same spot that we took them out of i have a little tray of assembly grease we're just going to dab each end of the push rod when we install it because it's going to take a little bit to build up oil pressure i want to have something so we don't have any metal to metal contact on that first startup so we're going to put this assembly grease on each side of the push rod we're also going to put it on the end of the valve where the rocker and the valve touch so that we're lubricated on first startup next we're going to go ahead and get our rockers installed and properly torqued down remember i marked all these so we're going to put them back in the location that they came from even though we didn't mess with our engine timing when we took the rockers off we still want to make sure we followed the procedure to reinstall them ideally you want to tighten and torque down each rocker when it's kind of in a static position meaning that if that rocker was torqued down all the way it would not be pushing a valve open if you have that rocker under stress while you're torquing it down you may find that resistance doesn't allow you to accurately torque down the rocker so what i did was i snugged the rockers down a little bit rotated the engine around till that cylinder was at top dead center with no valves open and then went ahead and torqued down the bolt for the rocker now in an effort to settle my paranoia i went back through and rotated the engine around half a turn at a time and re-torqued all of these bolts you also want to make sure that your rocker and your pushrod are all properly seated together this is a place where going back through what you've done one more time is usually a really good idea we can also rotate the engine around make sure that all of our push rods are pushing our rockers are rocking and our valves are opening next let's go ahead and do our valve cover we'll make sure we get the gasket on properly this valve cover does have a channel in it so we need to make sure that the gasket is fully seated in the channel we'll just go all the way around the valve cover and make sure it's in there properly we'll bring it over to the car and get it installed now you want to double check that gasket that we just installed and make sure a little piece didn't pop out like this one here if that happens you're gonna end up rolling the gasket and causing a pretty significant oil leak so we're gonna snug these down in a crisscross pattern and then torque these to 89 inch pounds of torque or right about seven pound feet of torque after that i want to get the spark plugs in because i want to make sure we're closing up any holes for things to fall into probably a good idea to go ahead and put new spark plugs in there but i want to make sure this car runs properly before we spend any more money on maintenance and things like that we can always come back later and do the spark plugs that's not that big of a deal i do want to spend a minute or two and clean the spark plugs though and go ahead and re-gap them these are gap 2.040 inches so we'll just go ahead and make sure these are gapped properly go ahead and start the spark plugs by hand snug them down and then torque these to 13 pound-feet of torque now just to keep them out of the way i'm gonna go ahead and put our spark plug wires on next let's go ahead and get that water pump installed we need to do a really good job cleaning this old gasket material off we'll just use our scraper and get that all out of the way make sure that there's nothing back here in our housing next we're going to get that big front bracket put back on i pulled our wiring harness up through up here because well then it's going to be out of our way i also laid the throttle body right up here we'll bolt that up in a little bit as well but i want to get this big bracket on this is going on quite a bit cleaner than when we took it off now we can focus on getting our power steering pump bolted back up we can get our alternator back in on where it goes including that bracket that's up underneath the intake manifold go ahead and get this bracket in next up we can get our ac compressor reinstalled get our throttle body on and start connecting some electrical connectors now i think we're gonna get that pipe that goes right across here the top of the valve cover in this does go underneath the spark plug wires now before you start locking this guy down we need to get our gasket on the cylinder head here just a paper gasket throw that up on the studs then we can get this housing on let's go ahead and round home on getting this engine put back together we have the pulley for the water pump the pulley for the fan as well we'll put the serpentine belt back on now i'm leaving the thermostat out on initial install that way we can really get some good coolant flow through our engine we don't have to worry about the thermostat getting yucked up with some of that nasty coolant mixture that was in the car now i expected this to leak but it leaked a little bit more than i had planned for so i went ahead and just cut out a quick paper gasket and put it back together that way we don't have to worry about a severe leak a little leak is okay though next we'll put our radiator in we'll get our fan installed we'll put our fan shroud back on for the air ducting i'm just gonna lay it here on the top of the engine we're gonna take it back apart anyway when we reinstall our thermostat so there's no sense in really fighting this to get it installed just to have to take it back out now that we have everything pretty much buttoned up on the engine side it is time to start the long and perhaps painful journey of engine oil and coolant flushing this engine because that coolant was pretty nasty and we had coolant in our oil we need to work really hard to make sure we get all that out of there on the engine oil side i'm just going to fill it with some leftover good engine oil that i have we're also going to run a liqui-moly engine flush this will increase the amount of detergents in our oil and help us get more of that contaminated engine oil out so we'll put the proper amount of engine oil in it we'll put a new engine oil filter in it we'll add our liqui-moly treatment then we're going to run the engine for about 15 minutes in order to circulate all that detergent through while our engine flush is running we're going to use this opportunity to also fill up and flush our cooling system at the same time i'm going to start off by just filling it with water just to get something to keep the engine from overheating in there this will also do a little bit to help us flush i'm also going to add a clr treatment to the coolant just a little bit in order to help break down some of that nasty buildup that was inside our cooling circuit if you're going to use something like clr you got to make 100 sure that you flush the coolant enough to get every bit of it back out now after that 10 or so minutes of running our engine oil flush through our system let's go ahead and drain it out as you can see we've pulled a lot of yuck out of our crankcase you may end up having to run this multiple times depending on the level of contamination in the engine now there is also a point where the right thing to do is going to be a full engine tear down however i don't think that's going to be the best course of action for this vehicle we also want to keep an eye on our coolant make sure our level's correct and as you can see we got some contamination coming up through our coolant funnel in the end i'm gonna end up doing two engine oil flushes and probably about 10 coolant flushes you really want to make sure you're doing this enough so that your engine oil is clean and when you drain the cooling system it's coming out as clean water once you have clean water coming out of your cooling system on the drain it's time to go ahead and fill it with actual properly mixed coolant now we have to do our final assembly on the vehicle including putting our air ducting and air box back where it belongs and also getting our thermostat put back in i left the thermostat out during the flushing process so we remove one obstruction from the cooling system granted the thermostat would have opened and allowed coolant to pass through but i found that when you're trying to do this level of flushing having no thermostat in there if it's possible really really helps now all we gotta do is take it on a test drive and wait for the owner to come on and get it i'm gonna give you a rundown of all the stuff that happened some drama but nothing crazy did find that the head gasket was leaking confirm that this is the head gasket that i took out of the car you can see these holes right here and like right here that's what it's supposed to look like if you look really close right there you can see a crack so coolant was coming up and going in these are this is where like the pusher rods come through and so this is oil and these are coolant and that made uh that made for a sad sad day i also even though you didn't ask fixed the door the door so when you open it and it like fell down yeah i opened the first time like oh no i can't have this so i took care of that too i fixed both doors so i got that done fresh oil changed fresh coolant fresh head gasket uh the head was cracked so the machine shop fixed that we talked about price and there's a couple of extra things the total is a little different than we talked about i expected it but um what you don't know is i actually was able to partner with advanced auto parts for this job uh so they took care of the bill so your bill is zero dollars uh yeah so yeah yeah i'm telling you that pay for your no nope it's all taken care of uh it is all taken care of you my friend are are a really awesome dude and it is my pleasure to be able to work this out for you well despite taking much longer than i actually had planned for doing the head gasket on the s10 not that hard of a job we did run into a couple of unexpected issues like the crack in the cylinder head and actually taking the head to the machine shop all together wasn't something i necessarily planned for let's do a bit of a breakdown on how much this might cost someone if they paid a shop to have this done so when it comes to parts prices our head gasket 25 our bolts 25 the gasket set that i bought 120 15 for the engine flush 15 worth of engine oil filters 38 dollars for the water pump i estimated about 50 in oil and about 20 dollars in coolant that adds up to right around two hundred and eighty dollars and i would say there's probably another thirty to forty dollars in chemicals and cleaners and that kind of stuff normal shop supplies now when it comes to labor time the book time on that was seven 7.9 hours now that doesn't actually include all the extra cleaning and things that we had to do to get this engine properly put back together this doesn't include removing the lifters and cleaning them cleaning out all the yuck from the rockers doing the oil flushes doing the coolant flushes or any of that stuff so i'd probably estimate another two or so hours at least in cleaning to get the engine right where i would feel comfortable putting it back together we also had the machine shop charge which was right about 200 bucks now i told tom this would be about eleven or twelve hundred dollars not planning for the machine shop charge after adding up all the parts and the labor at a reasonable shop labor rate uh it actually came out to like seventeen hundred dollars so make sure you're checking the actual labor time before just randomly quoting a job now luckily for mr tom none of that even mattered and i was able to take care of it for him a very deserving man so happy happy to help all right with that i am out thank you so much for watching and i'll talk to you again next time

Channel: HumbleMechanic

Views: 585,868

Rating: 4.9209805 out of 5

Keywords: overheating, coolant and oil mix, failing head gasket, blown head gasket, chevy s10 head gasket, head gasket replacement, head gasket sealer, head gasket, head gasket symptoms, head gasket smoke, head gasket repair

Id: fhU_56cruIA

Length: 37min 39sec (2259 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021