MMO w/ Stop Leak

[Tobygot]

Hi. I bought a '99 Saturn w/ 270,000 miles on it. I've been running Mobil 5000 10w-30 w/ 20% MMO for about 700 miles and I changed the filter at 500 miles.
I now have what appears to be a cracked head w/ oil leaking to the outside of the engine.

I want to add some Stop Leak. Should I drain out this oil w/ 20% MMO or not worry about it?
Would a Stop Leak product w/ shell 15w-40 be too thick?

It just doesn't make sense to me to spend the money on a rebuilt head + the price for the gasket kit. Makes more sense to me to drive it till it's dead and then buy a rebuilt long block.

Thanks for any advise.

 

[bmwtechguy]

You're sure it's not just a leaking valve cover gasket? Is this a DOHC? Sometimes a leak can look obvious from a certain point, but later you find it was leaking from a point higher and running down due to gravity, etc. If you truly have a cracked cyl head, there is no product that I am aware of you can add to your oil to plug the resulting oil flow from a cyl head crack. Usually a cyl head crack leaks combustion gas/coolant, not oil. Did this engine get severely overheated recently?

 

[Tobygot]

I can't see any oil or even any moisture around the valve cover. Yes, it's DOHC. The leak looks like it's coming from the bottom of the exhaust manifold where it bolts up to the engine.
The leak is coming from behind the exhaust manifold, and not leaking "onto" it I believe this would be where the head meets the engine block.
I recently had a clogged cat that made my car stall. I had to drive it home for 20 miles with it barely moving. After fixing the cat, I found I had a clogged precat. I also pulled off the exhaust manifold and cleaned what carbon I could. It's fixed now and runs great. Maybe the pressure from the engine trying to push against clogged cats cracked the head?
From what I found on the Saturn forum, these cars don't typically have problems with blown head gaskets but the place where I think I have a cracked head is in the usual place where they crack.
I just figure I will run thicker oil to slow the leak for now.
I'm not sure if 15w-40 w/ a Stop Leak additive will be too thick though.
I live in AZ where we have the second hottest high temps in America. I'm not really worried about cold starts, or should I be?

 

[mechtech2]

You have a car that is at the end of it's life cycle.
A head gasket is most likely, but sure, it could be the head [or both!].
There are varieties off stop leak products. Some are $10, some are $40. People can get good results, but don't count on it.
Probably worth a try . Thicker oil always helps to some degree.

 

[chevrofreak]

If you have a leak, MMO is one of the last things you want in your engine. I had 4 quarts of 15w-40 and 1 quart of MMO in my car a while back, and it leaked out my rear main seal like it wasn't even there. Prior to that, there had never been a single drip from the RMS, just a damp oil pan and transmission.

 

[Tobygot]

I probably just threw away my money. I bought a bottle of Stop Leak at Walmart (the one from the makers of sta-bil that sais it has 2 to 3 times the ingredients). I added it to my oil w/ the MMO still in there.
Hopefully to MMO isn't going to clean up whatever the Stop Leak is trying to do.
I also have a timing chain leak that started up a few hundred miles into the MMO treatment, so i need to get rid of that leak too.

 

[Spyder7]

My well meant advice, after my one and only experience with throwing good money after bad into a car I should have dumped while I could have still salvaged anything from it: cut your losses and sell it. Even if you don't get much for it, you can plow it into something fundamentally sound with 4 wheels and a solid engine. My last car being an exception, as I got it already far below market value, is that even on a modest budget you can get something sound at any price range so long as you're willing to buy something otherwise sound that other people will pass on just looking at.

I love cosmetic blemishes. The more the merrier. Nothing torpedoes the value of a car like major dings and scratches in very visible places. Body shops usually charge too much for the seller to bother with and will simply chop their price a lot. Meanwhile, providing you avoid damage extensive enough to require having parts welded on or replaced, a lot of ugly things can be restored to passable levels with a few bucks in a few tools and materials.

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And as a used car buyer, there is nothing more beautiful to me than the otherwise eyesore that is being sold for peanuts and that I know I can restore with only a little money spent, in my spare time, and take a lot of satisfaction from the before and after results (along with the pleasure of getting a good buy). I won't touch it if the glass is damaged however, as then you're getting into more expensive PITA type work.

Anyway, bottom line is its time to cut your losses and walk away. This car is at its end of life, and any dollar you spend on it, short of a few bucks to make it more presentable, you'll wind up kicking yourself for soon enough when you're down big money and it still needs more work, or winds up dying on you first and you have to settle for whatever peanuts you can take from salvage.

-Spyder

 

[GMorg]

The stop-leak products are designed to soften/swell seals. If you actually have a crack, stop-leak shouldn't really help at all. Did you find a product that claims to work through some other mechanism?

 

[c3po]

Originally Posted By: Tobygot

Hi. I bought a '99 Saturn w/ 270,000 miles on it.


That's alot of miles, hope you got the car real cheap.

Quote:
I now have what appears to be a cracked head w/ oil leaking to the outside of the engine.


If you had a CRACKED HEAD, I am thinking your car would be overheating, have coolant in the oil, or be running TERRIBLE.

Quote:
It just doesn't make sense to me to spend the money on a rebuilt head + the price for the gasket kit. Makes more sense to me to drive it till it's dead and then buy a rebuilt long block.


I agree with what you are saying here, except I would not even think of a rebuilt long block. The problem with buying a used car is that you do not know how the previous owner took care of the car, are you the 2nd owner or the 3rd owner.

 

[Tobygot]

I'm the 3rd owner but the first 2 were in the same family. I've now learned that "original owner" car's aren't always good. When I drained out the oil right after I bought it, chunks of sludge came out. The coolant looked like dirty water, no green or yellow at all. The power steering fluid was black.

I think I figured out what the problem is. I took off the exhaust manifold recently to clean out whatever carbon I could. I pulled out all of the studs as well. i didn't realize that oil can leak from the studs. There was no oil on any of them when I pulled them out. I found that it's possible for them to leak though. I'm going to pull out the studs that appear to be leaking and put on some high temp RTV tomorrow. Too much of a coincedence that I pulled it off and 3 days later I have a leak. I see a tiny amount of oil coming from one of the top studs too. I hope this is my problem. The majority of the oil is coming from the exact area where saturn s series heads typically crack, or so I've heard.

What's bad about remanufactured long blocks? It's alot cheaper than buying a new car. Are many of them poorly made?

 

[Spyder7]

Its not that, its that given the mileage on the car and all the wear systems independent of the long block (rack and steering, suspension, HVAC, etc), you could spend a wad on replacing the long block only to then find yourself getting continually nickel and dimed as other things wear out and need to be replaced. At that mileage, every system in the car is a candidate for soon to fail or need to be fixed/replaced.

Putting a long block into a newer, lower mileage car may not be a bad idea in some cases. But its usually regarded as a bad investment in something with the mileage you're looking at now, and generally considered the "last straw" that leads to the car being sold or retired.

You don't need to buy a new car to replace the Saturn. There are alternatives in the used car market that will be fundamentally sound and won't begin with the expense of a long block replacement, followed by cascading failures due to wear accumulated with the high mileage.

-Spyder

 

[HangerHarley]

Originally Posted By: Tobygot
I'm the 3rd owner but the first 2 were in the same family. I've now learned that "original owner" car's aren't always good. When I drained out the oil right after I bought it, chunks of sludge came out. The coolant looked like dirty water, no green or yellow at all. The power steering fluid was black.

I think I figured out what the problem is. I took off the exhaust manifold recently to clean out whatever carbon I could. I pulled out all of the studs as well. i didn't realize that oil can leak from the studs. There was no oil on any of them when I pulled them out. I found that it's possible for them to leak though. I'm going to pull out the studs that appear to be leaking and put on some high temp RTV tomorrow. Too much of a coincedence that I pulled it off and 3 days later I have a leak. I see a tiny amount of oil coming from one of the top studs too. I hope this is my problem. The majority of the oil is coming from the exact area where saturn s series heads typically crack, or so I've heard.

What's bad about remanufactured long blocks? It's alot cheaper than buying a new car. Are many of them poorly made?


Been there, done that. Sounds like you had an Overheat, and not just a "Run Hot!"

Do this:

1) Get ALL Coolant out.
2) Get "eal-up" OR K&W.. anyone, the expensive one, the $30 one.
3) Pour it in a water-filled coolant system (that you flushed, so they say, im not so sure) - HOT!
4) Let it run until it starts to heat up.
5) GET THE WATER OUT if you DONT get the water out, it WONT work right!
6) Take Spark Plugs out, find a way to do this, buy the socket, let it sit overnight and half a day.
7) Change the OIL. Use a nice thick 20W-50, AND a bottle of Lucas Stop-Leak, worked for me in the past.
8) PRAY.

Usually, when Antifreeze is added it un-does the coolant system head/block seal. The ever-hated Lucas Stop Leak thick syrup SHOULD stick to something, and get to no more elak. Go nice and easy on the car, and you may have bought a lot of life on it. Fixed it? Not sure, as antifreeze will likely work it off.. but Yup!

End of its life cycle is right.. Not gone yet, though! he next overheat, plan on getting a new engine OR complete tear-down, and hope that Blcok is ok.. HAVE A SHOP TEST IT! See what they say. heads go first, sometimes it ok, but you almost SURELY have a Gasket issue.

Good luck to ya, sir

 

[c3po]

Originally Posted By: Tobygot
. When I drained out the oil right after I bought it, chunks of sludge came out. The coolant looked like dirty water, no green or yellow at all. The power steering fluid was black.


Since the coolant looked like dirty water it sounds like this engine was topped off with water, it may already be shot.

If you got this car real cheap, I would cut my losses and say GOODBYE.

 

[HangerHarley]

Originally Posted By: c3po
Originally Posted By: Tobygot
. When I drained out the oil right after I bought it, chunks of sludge came out. The coolant looked like dirty water, no green or yellow at all. The power steering fluid was black.


Since the coolant looked like dirty water it sounds like this engine was topped off with water, it may already be shot.

If you got this car real cheap, I would cut my losses and say GOODBYE.


You say "Coolant looked like dirty water." c3po says it may already be shot, if topped off with water.

Im a little lost here. c3po, please explain the relevance of the appearance fof the coolant? I know (somewhat) what Oil contaminated with coolant looks like, it starts to look like cottage cheese. Chunky and milky. But why the coolant important?

OP, you pulled the coolant hose AND drained the Oil? You sense they were mixing? Slightly confused.. that engine may need a tear-down but how can we deduce this from the COOLANT? Car may have just had sludge that came out with heat.. ?

Also, if it DID fail somewhere, it is clean inside, due to water cleaning away sludge..

 

[Tobygot]

I don't see any evidence of a blown head gasket. I changed the oil and coolant 750 miles ago and they both still look good. I agree that I think it was constantly topped off with water. The coolant temp sensor was bad so the car appeared to always be running nice and cool when it was actually running rich all the time trying to heat the engine up. I think the sludge was probably from being run too low on oil. It burns about 1 quart per 100 miles of city driving so it would be easy to let it run low. When I bought the car there were no leaks.

I only paid $300 for this car btw. I've put alot of work into it though and spent money on everything that needed to be done for maintenance. It gets more than twice the mpg as my Expedition, so I'm hoping it lasts a while.

I don't think putting RTV on the end of the exhaust manifold studs is going to fix my problem. There was no oil at the end of any of them. Maybe I do have a cracked head. It runs great though. Wouldn't it run bad from air getting sucked in if I had a cracked head?

Maybe it did overheat. I took it on a 120 mile trip hoping to get the engine hot and get the MMO to do it's thing. 20 miles to home, I downshifted going up a hill, hit 4,200 rmp for about 1 second and stalled. After trying a few times, I was able to get the car started about 10 minutes later. It would barely go 10 mph up the rest of the 3 or 4 mile hill. Drove fine going down and got me home. I had to clean the Cat and PreCat. It runs great now, but maybe I cracked the head in the process. When I was on the side of the road stalled, I took off the oil fill cap and checked my oil and smoke was steaming out of both holes. I don't usually check my oil 2 minutes after driving so I'm not sure if that's normal.

Could oil be leaking out my exhaust manifold? If I'm burning 1 quart per 100 miles could fresh oil make it past the combustion chamber and into the exhaust? The car leaves a trail of smoke everywhere I go, but not for the first 1/4 mile when it's cold. So maybe the smoke is from oil burning in my exhaust?

 

[Spyder7]

Your experience is oddly reminiscent of my own one time experience of pouring good money into a car after bad. I bought a $500 beater, and though I didn't expect much for the price, I cut a lot of corners and made a lot of mistakes when I checked it out that, had I been more thorough (as I am since), I would have walked. At the time I was between cars and I let the pressure I was feeling to get something now get the better part of me and bought the first thing I looked at with minimal inspection of it.

I then compounded the mistake when I started putting the money into all the things it needed, when it was still not too late to cut my losses and just resell it. 5 months after I bought it the rusted out oil pan started to leak. I spent more on having it replaced with a new pan. Then a few weeks later the engine blew on the highway (it had run dry - the pan was never properly installed, even after I brought it back when I first noticed there was something wrong for them to "fix").

Even if the pan was installed properly, I never would have gotten back, in longevity, the money I poured into it. Instead it would have continued to nickel and dime me with one unexpected repair after another.

It was an expensive lesson, but I learned a lot from it and will never repeat that mistake again.

-Spyder

 

[demarpaint]

Originally Posted By: Spyder7
It was an expensive lesson, but I learned a lot from it and will never repeat that mistake again.

-Spyder


I call that an education, and anyone who paid for college knows how expensive an education can be. The good news is it was a mistake that you will never repeat again. Call it money well spent!

 

[Familyguy]

Firstly, it is extremely unlikely that your oil leak is from a cracked head. It's also impossible for you to lose oil out of an exhaust manifold stud. There's no oil on the other side of those studs. It is FAR more likely that your cam/valve cover gasket is leaking and the oil is running down to where you're seeing it. Those plastic valve covers are notorious for warping and leaking. If it was me, I'd replace that gasket after confirming that the cover isn't warped (put it on a flat surface and eyeball it). It's literally a 20 minute job. And don't forget a little dab of RTV on the joints on the passenger side of the head where the timing cover mates to the head under the valve cover.

The stop leak is an utter and complete waste of money. The MMO will indeed clean up your engine a bit, but it could also "encourage" leaks. Get her cleaned up with a couple of 3000 mile oil changes with PYB + 20% MMO and then switch to your favorite brand of oil and be done with it. Those engines are fairly bullet proof if they're well maintained, but I suspect you're due for a set of rings and valve guides by now.

Good luck.

 

[Tobygot]

I've tried many times now to try to find a leak from the valve cover gasket. I can't find any oil anywhere around it or running from it. I'm worried that if I pull off the valve cover, it WILL be warped. Then I'll have to buy a new one.

If my valve cover gasket is leaking, shouldn't I be able to find at least a little oil coming from it?