FTO AUSTRALIA

Hi, just wondering if anyone would be able to come take a look at my car, just to see if they can diagnose the overheating issue, just in case it isnt a head gasket.

Im located in the western suburbs of melbourne.

Cheers

Just reading your previous thread/s........how much do you trust your mechanic?

Can you guarantee that he did swap over your thermostat? If not, check it again.....pull it out and put it in hot water to check if it's working

And did he really fix your thermos? They take a bloody long time to engage from a cold start.

i would trust him, but then again, who knows.

im not very mech-savvy, so i wouldnt know where to start to remove the thermostat anyways. i wouldnt know what im looking at :/

I know a good mechanic in Brunswick if you're willing to drop your car off there. He worked on my car for a RWC a few months ago.

Just did what dstocks suggested in one of my other posts about the rad cap and bubbles....


....aaaaaand small bubbles. also the car idled roughly too. so here i am guessing its a head gasket.

If it's head gasket, check your coolant levels. Have you lost much? If it is a head gasket and there are bubbles, in theory you should be blowing white sweet smelling smoke out of your exhaust even after the car's warmed up.

Also with the car running....pop the bonnet. Do you see any steam coming out anywhere?

Umm, not sure. Will check

c0n13oX wrote:Umm, not sure. Will check

@ your sig

White smoke from exhaust, coolants low, rough idle....wom wom

Head gasket

Yep.. parting it out and then just gonna take it to wreckers unfortunately. Cant afford to fix it.

Yep certainly sounds like head gasket. But not the end of the world.

Head gasket replacement is not an impossible job, just a pain in the ass while the engine's in the car. I think last time I did it I found it easier to remove the whole engine which also made it easier to change the water pump, timing belt and clean the crap out of it.

You've got two options and hopefully they'll help you decide which way to go:

Replace Head Gasket
- Head gasket, approx $40-$60 per gasket from Amayama (you should only need one) If it isn't obvious which gasket's blown (eg. you can't see whether steam is coming out of the front back or the rear bank) then a mechanic can do a leakdown test to see which gasket needs replacing. Labour involved would be undoing timing belt cover, remove timing belt from cam sprocket, remove cam assembly section at the top (if mivec), remove headbolts and voila the head is ready to come out. Add an extra 10-15 mins if it's the rear bank to remove the intake plenum. This should take a mechanic less than a day to do coz there's nothing overly complex to do. The extra time and cost you're up for here though is that when you remove the head, you should always take it to a rebuild place anyway to inspect/shave the head for when you put it back.

Replace Engine
I've done this enough times to know that this can be something you can probably do in a day but takes me a couple due to procrastination. The only difficult part I find annoying during this job is disconnecting the transmission from the engine. I've used a mechanic in the past to do this and only charged me $1000 which sounds about right for the labour involved

Now that its written, changing the head gasket doesnt sound like such a hard task. We shall see what I decide though