Shop said NO to engine flush...

[Wheeler]

I went to a shop to have the engine flush and the shop said thay wont do it because there was alot of that rad sealent in the system.Than he said there was a little trace of oil in the coolent.
He than said it might be the head gasket or engine block cracked.To look at the engine you cant see any wet spots on the outside of thew engine.
What should i look for?Where do i go from here?I want it fixed but i also like to know what the problem is.
If it's the engine block than i dont know what i want to do with it.If it's the head gasket's than i'll replace them.
So where can oil get in the coolent?

[Takumi Fujiwara]

lol, engine flushing is not really worth much of much, just do a carbon cleaning the whole way around, TB- gas tank, stuff liek that, and then clean ur oil in like 400 miles.

[John_D.]

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Wheeler:
What should i look for?Where do i go from here?I want it fixed but i also like to know what the problem is.
If it's the engine block than i dont know what i want to do with it.If it's the head gasket's than i'll replace them.
So where can oil get in the coolent?<hr></blockquote>

Typically it's the head gasket, and usually coolant gets in the oil, rather than oil getting in the coolant. Since the coolant is under pressure, it pushes out of the water jacket and into the crankcase, along a weak sealing point in the head gasket. Oil just drains back from the head to the oilpan, so it's not under pressure at that point, to get into the coolant passages.

The head gasket can leak inside the engine, but not have any leaks on the outside. GM often puts sealer in the system to take care of minor leaks.

They repeatedly gobbed it into a 4.3L I had, to fix an external head gasket leak that also was leaking internally and caused the oil level to rise about a quart a week... Finally the bearings gave up and they had to put a whole new engine in it...

Sometimes a flush will cause a leak to start up again, so that's why the shop is hesitant to go that route, they don't want to be responsible for trying to fix the leak again. But if you just put more stop-leak back in it, you will probably be ok.

Even just draining and refilling the coolant can bring back a leak. It did this past fall on my Passport, the heater core... A bottle of stop-leak and I'm good to go again. (for a while anyway)

[67-03 RIP]

You might want to try some of the ceramic based block sealer available at a lot of parts stores instead of stop leak. Make sure to following the directions though - most of them you have to run in straight water (no antifreeze) at first. Stock car guys use this stuff quite a bit.

Ron

[Wheeler]

Thanks guys for the replays.
I should have said that i only owned the car for 3 weeks.I brought the car in to have the coolent changed because the car is a 1997 and it's about time to change it.I have no idea why the "stuff" was in the cooling system at all.
On a good note, I bought the car from a car dealer.So thay said thay will flush and change the coolent with new Dex-cool GM stuff.And than do some test on the car to find out why the sealent was in there in the first place.And what ever is wrong thay will fix for free.

It maybe nothing yet.
I'll find out on Monday.