Watwood

Cliffs Notes:

White exhaust smoke at idle and especially when first accelerating.

Hard miss when first accelerating.

While out for a "I finally got my car back together" drive today car began approaching 260 degrees real quick today so I kept shutting it down. Would wait a couple of minutes and crank it back up to limp on down the road. Very hard starting now. Also, constant bad miss. Stopped at a service station and kinda burped the system by loosening the radiator cap. Leaving here I cranked it, she was raising temps real quick again, running like crap, then all of a sudden, within about 1 second, back down to 180 like always and no more miss...

Get the car back to the house, 180 for the rest of the trip, let it idle for a second, blip the throttle, white smoke again.

I know what I think it is, but I wanted to hear it from y'all.


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Few more details.

Car ran quite well before taking it apart...

A/C stopped blowing cold, so I replaced everything minus the evaporator. To do this I must remove the passenger side header.

While in here I replaced the motor mounts with polyurethane, which requires jacking the motor up like crazy. Jacked on the bell housing.

With the header out I decided to put some high temp fiberglass wrap around the wires that run along the passenger side wheel well. To do this I cut and re-saudered the O2 sensor connections and the ground that hooks to the block.

Radiator was cracked so I replaced it. <- This could be key point here, but the temps never got up to 260. Heck the fans don't come up until 225 so there's not much play there.

Put in 4 new AC Delco plugs on the passenger side cylinder bank, with new Taylor cut to fit wires.


It ran good for about a day and then started sputtering last night at low rpms accelerations, then today all hell broke loose with the overheating, missing, and all that good stuff.

Right now I hate my car. But, this could be a good thing performance wise...

How easy do the heads crack on these cars?

jonesy

when the car is cold , remove radiator cap and start it up, look for bubbles in the coolant. sounds like you have blown a head gasket.if its a head they are easy to repair

ulakovic22

Blown head gasket and you might have warped the head. I find it odd though that you never had a problem before you replaced the radiator. My guess is that when you replaced the radiator you didn't bleed the system all the way and had air bubbles. This causes the fluctuation in your coolant temps and might have caused you to overheat and blow the head gasket. Have you done a leak down test or compression test on the system yet?

Watwood

^ Once I finished replacing everything and was putting it back together I poured around 1 gallon of coolant into the thermostat housing and another ~2/3 gallon of coolant into the radiator. I figured this would be enough to get me started. Drive around the block, and add a little more. This is the way I've always done it so perhaps I've been doing it wrong for a long while...

Guess I could have had pockets of air, but the temp gauge never came above 180 until yesterday, when it presumably was low on coolant from it all leaking out through the cylinder.

Also, the only other thing I can think of is that when re-installing the header I put in one bolt about 4-5 threads to kinda hold it while I maneuvered in the front and rear bolts. I would hope this wouldn't jack up my heads, but you never know.

Guess I'll look into the leak down and compression tests.

4THGEN Z

so after you replaced the rad, did you ever remove air from the brass bleeder screws in the 2 heater lines? If not you didn't get all the air out which probably led to head gasket problem.

Watwood

^ Nope, but I never have before, and I've had coolant out of the car a good bit for maintenance. But, guess there is always a first time...