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Oil in coolant.

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MaxChase88

Probationary Member
12
0
Mar 28, 2016
greenwood, Delaware
Hey, so I noticed my coolant overflow was leaking brown fluid. I check my coolant and it's thick brown and smells like oil. I was told my head gasket is blown. But my car runs fine doesn't overheat or anything. Please help me is this the beginning of my head gasket going? What should I do?
 
There are very few places oil and coolant can exchange with each other. Headgasket is definetly one of them. And you dont need to overheat to have a bad headgasket because a headgasket can fail in multiple ways..
If the headgasket leaks on the outside, you will leak fluid.
If the headgasket fails between oil and coolant, you will mix them
If the headgasket fails between coolant and your cylinder, you will overheat
And if the headgasket fails between the cylinder and oil, you will smoke and shoot your dipstick into the atmosphere.

As the wiseman said, if you perform a pressure test on your coolant system, you can tell if there's any leaks under pressure.
Maybe the wiseman can help but the only other way I can see an exchange of oil and coolant is possibly in the turbo or user error.
 
One more common spot on 91 up cars. Oil cooler especially if somebody tightened up the center bolt. You can crush it accidently. Dont drive the car like this. Bearings will suffer and fail.
 
Is that a 1g thing? Its been a while so Im trying to remember. I believe when my talon was stock, it had a radiator, smic, auto tranny cooler, and a bar infront of the radiator which I would think was for oil but for some reason memory tells me it was for the power steering.
I dont remember any center bolt though.
 
I did a coolant flush and used bars stop leak and it's fine now. Car runs perfect still no oil I'm coolant. Oil levels normal everything is good.
 
Just remember when the car is running, oil goes into the coolant and when the car is hot but off (no oil pressure) coolant goes into the oil. You definitely should at a minimum change the oil. When you do be sure to suction the oil pan as coolant likes to sit on the bottom of the pan.

As good as Bar's may be, it is just a band-aid. Save some money and get it fixed.
 
Make sure it is actually oil before you start worrying. It could, for example, be redline water wetter that has been in the coolant too long and finally broke down, or an incompatible combo/mix of coolant types can also leave brown oily looking deposits. It is well documented if you google search. Still, you should do an engine checkup:

--Compression tester (just buy one, HF sells em cheap)
--Leak down test (HF or OTC tools,
--Block/combustion gas tester kit is a $25 rental at any parts store, the fluid will run you $5-8 to do a few tests.
--Coolant pressure test kit (pressurize the coolant system)

Just wait till all those copper chunks you put in your system mess up your water pump... Then you are gonna be doing more work later. It must be a major pain to remove all of that crap from everything (engine block, heater core, radiator, etc) after you finally fix the real problem.
 
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