head gasket problems?

[mike h]

a friend of mine who is a mecahnic told me the problem might be the head gasket because i went like a month with my serpentine belt on incorrectly thanks to the local car wash/repair shop :rolleyes: . what are the symptoms of a bad head gasket (is it referred to as a blown head gasket?)? what is a head gasket? TIA

[BLLDOGG]

symptoms can be coolant in your oil and over heating

[FlamespikeMST1]

and a loss of power, and ive heard somewhere trouble starting maybe BLLDOGG you can clear this up for me?

[01camaro3.8]

i experienced both of those ^^ when my gaskets were blown

[OneBad9D5]

i just replaced mine 3 days ago and man was it a pain all the local shops wanted minimum of $650 to change them but i got a good friend to do it for free

I experienced steam out of throttle body, coolant dissapearing, little white smoke, light brown oil, overheating badly, and couldnt really give throttle over 3500 rpms.

good luck and i hope its not the head gasket.

[mike h]

it is the head gasket, they want $2000 to fix it, and they say it isnt even close to blown just a little crack. its getting 50 ppm of hydrocarbons in the test they did, and though i dont know what that means they said a full blown one does 450-500. soOoOo... they used a GM cooling tablet (what is that) to temporarily seal it. $2,000 is a crazy amount of money, and my stepbrother volunteered to do it for me but i dont trust just any old guy working on it. what are the worst things that could happen when doing it yourself and how hard is it to do on a scale of 1 to 10, 1=changing oil and 10=rebuilding engine or something.

[OneBad9D5]

basically its about a 9 since you have to tear the whole thing down to the block. I would let your step brother do it.

The parts only cost about $50 but the rest is in labor cause its a pain to do it.

Does your heat guage float from going up kinda high then dropping?