Hi, I have been reading posts here for a while, and more than a few times I have gotten some valuable info for my 1969 4-Door Buick Lesabre. I put a reman. engine (350 Buick)in it with a Holley Electric fuel pump and a Holley 600 carb. At first I had black smoke (too rich i know)but my car overheated the other day and now white smoke is coming out my drivers side pipe. My engine has less that 1,000 miles on it, but since it overheated I don't know if warranty will cover it. I suspect it is the head gasket, but I don't know. Please Advise. Thanks.
does it smell sweet? burning coolant usually exhudes a sweet smell. Check your crankcase oil if you blew the head gasket then it should look like a choclate milkshake down there (sometimes foamy also). Why did your engine overheat? there are a lot of things that can cause an engien to overheat, some are realted to the cooling system, some to timing, and some may be mechanical. If you know what casued the overheat and you know that the shop did the work then take ti back to them and demand they fix it. Even if the warranty on the engine doesn;t cover it if they installed and timed the distributor a it was a timing issue that caused the overheat they should cover the replacement of a head gasket. If it was a lean condition that casued your overheat and you were messign with the carb's jetting, they may not cover it. Basically take the thing back to them and tell them about the smoke but don't tell them much else. Let them have a good look at it and tell you what it is. If you tell them off the bat that it was an overheat you may have a hard time getting them to look at it and an even harder time getting them to fix it under warranty, let them draw their own conclusions.
I went through this, this past summer. Mine didn't overheat, in fact it ran great the night before I noticed it. I parked it for a few days and when I started it the next time, everything was okay, except I had a misfire in one of the cylinders. I never found out why the white smoke came out of the motor, but I did find a bent pushrod in my #1 cylinder, and a broken rocker arm on the #5, when I took the valve cover off. My suggestion is to take the valve covers off and look for anything broken or stressed, BEFORE you decide to take the head off, and remove all of the brackets and stuff from the front of the motor, or before you take off the intake manifold. Since I didn't do that first, I decided to remove the head and replace the gasket anyway, which was a PITA, only to find that my gasket was fine. ou: I still haven't found anyone who can explain why a bent or broken valve or bent pushrod could produce white smoke, but it doesn't smoke a bit since that initial day, before I took the head off. There is still an issue with ZERO compression in the #1 cylinder, but that's another story. p
Scott, It sounds like you had water in the cylinder to begin with and hydrolocked the motor bending the pushrod and valve. White smoke is produced by water or coolant burning, but neither fluid compress the same way gasoline does, in fact they compress very little often damaging the engine components when it does occur. The bent pushrod didn't cause the white smoke, water did and it bent your valve and pushrod, it might have also damaged the rings on the piston (assuming that the #1 cylinder is the one all this happened to) and that might explain why you have no compression. The only mystery remains is how the water or coolant got in the engine. It is not impossible for condensation to form on the cylinder walls of a dormant engine, but it is rare in one that is full assembled and in running condition. Radical changes in temp and humidity could be to blame (some racers traveling from the north to the south will run tranny fluid in their oil (with the plugs removed) because it collects the condensation that forms inside the engine - this is called fagging the block). An engine is not imprevious, and water can find it's way in sometimes. As far as the car that started this thread is concerned, if you are mechanically inclined pull the valve cover and inspect the valve train, a bent pushrod or rocker, or valve could be an good indicator that the headgasket is gone. I wouldn't drive the car too much as it stands and if you want them to warranty it, I wouldn't go much further than removing the valve cover.
Would it be possible for a head gasket to be blown, but not be able to see it with the naked eye? When I looked at it, I just pulled it out (and by that time it had oil and junk all over it from wrestling the head off the block), and looked at it and it looked okay, so I chucked it. Maybe I should take the car to a shop before I have the valves torn apart, to see if someone can tell me if it's the rings or not first. I checked the cylinders with a compression checker, and it had absolutley no compression at all. I put some motor oil down the spark plug hole to see it it made any difference at all, and got no compression. That's why the guys who responded to my thread (several of them) said that it sounded like one of the valves is bent and stuck in the open position. The car sounds has no vacuum any more either and back fires sometimes, so they think it might be the intake valve stuck open. To tell you the truth, I haven't really messed with it in over 3 months. Been helping a friend finish his 68 Pontiac up, and since I bought a new home, it's one thing after another for that. :grin: I gotta get it ready for winter, cutting tree limbs and stuff like that, then I'll have all winter to work on the Buick.
Scott, tough to say as to whether you can always see a blown head gasket, I've seen some that were fine but leaked, but a head gasket is not the only way for coolant to get into the cylinder, a warped deck could do it (casued by overheating) as well as a cracked head or block. If you have no compression a stuck or bent valve could very well be to blame but they would have been obvious once you pulled the head and found the valve bent or hammered there. With blown rings you would still see some compression but very little unless the rings are completely off the piston and the piston is moving free in the bore (you'd know it sounds like rod knock). A bent pushrod by itself wouldn't give you low compression because it would jut keep the valve from opening to it's full lift. however if you have a bent push rod you have a bent valve as the two rarely happen independently. One other thing to check is the travel of the piston as you might have a slightly bent connecting rod. An eas way to check this is if you have the head off move the #1 piston to TDC and measure the distance from it to the deck height, then do the same to the #2 piston and they should be extremely close, if not the rod may be bent and that would keep the piston from coming up all the way and giving you a good compression reading. Of course wasted rings and a bent rod would probably give you no comp but you'd also hear noticable piston slap. Chances are you have bent valve on # 1 and # 5 but it never hurts to check, I don;t mean to scare you with this, just run through the possibilities. If you are mechanically inclined pull the head and take a look. Get a straight edge (metal and perfectly straight) and a feeler gauge and check the block deck around the cylinder. Pull the valves and take a look at the #1 valve that had the bent pushrod (most likely intake). best of luck, I'm sure it is nothing major but it helps to evaluate all scenarios.
When I initially had issues, the #1 cylinder was fine, until I replaced the gasket and put it back together. I cleaned out the cylinder with a towel, but maybe when I put it back together some coolant leaked from the block into the cylinder or something. The pushrod was bent beforehand though, and looked like it had been for a while, as there were shavings on top of the head where there is a little "tray" that guides the oil back to the return holes. The car sat in a garage for over 20 years with minimal run time on it. It only has 240 miles on the motor, since it was installed in 1981, so who knows what might have happened from sitting all that time and the oil gumming up. I'm hoping to get the hood off this weekend and lights put up on our new garage, and started on dismantling everything. I'm taking the motor and transmission out and putting it on a stand for the winter, so I can go out in the middle of the night if I want to and tinker with it. :bglasses:
Not to be a :Smarty: ....but....in fact, fluids do not compress at all, be it coolant, water, gasoline or any other type of fluid. Its one of the basic laws of Physics. However, these things compress very well while in a vaporous state of matter. p :Smarty: Sorry, I couldn't resist. It's an occupational hazzard. :laugh:
not to rebut the laws of physics but in laymans terms some fluids have a little more "give" than others, otherwise we would use water instead of brake fluid (corrosive properties aside) in the hydraulic systems on our cars. But the "give" in each system is so negligible that it serves 99% of the time to say that fluids don't compress.
Not true...fluids do not compress...period. This is a fundamental law of physics. :Smarty: The reason you don't use water in hydraulic applications has to do with boiling point and corrosion. :TU:
The following liquids have compressability raitings (Compressibility k109 Pa-1 ) Benzene:0.97 Carbon tetrachloride: 0.91 Ethanol: 0.87 Glycerine: 0.21 Mercury: 0.038 Water: 0.45 Now I may not be reading the source for these correctly but as I undestand it they are slightly compressible. it came from this link for a table of fluid properties: http://members.tripod.com/~IgorIvanov/physics/fluid-static.html click here for the table: http://imartinez.etsin.upm.es/dat1/eLIQ.htm For the purposes of our discussion, we can just say that the piston, rod, and valves in an engine will all fail before you even begin to compress the water and leave it at that.
Okay, if I read this right this motor has low miles, but has been mostly sitting. Started off and on over the years, correct?? Here is what happened to my 350. Before I bought it it had been sitting. He ran it every once and a while. After it sat he tried to start it again. Then it sat until he gave up on it. He ran it on old gas and then let it sit. The old gas sat on the valves and turned to varnish. When he tried to start it the valves were stuck in the head. When the valve would not open the push rods bent. So if it was run on bad gas and then let to sit this could be it. I could tap the valves open with a hammer and they would stay open. After about an hour and a few cans of carb spray I got the valves free. Mine also ended up having cracked heads. it was a 1968 350 and I needed five cores to get two heads that were not cracked. If water was getting into a cylinder the top of the piston and the bowl of the head should look much cleaner than the others. HTH John
