kmd

just pulled the dipstick in the camaro and it's all milked up. i'm sure everyone knows that all signs point to head gaskets on this one. i've never had to do head gaskets before so can anyone give me a general idea of how hard it can be? if it's too difficult then i'll just take it to a garage and have it done. and just out of curiousity, how easily can stock 305 heads get warped? i had a heater hose blow up on me on my way home and was close enough to get home. kevin

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8t2 z-chev

any other signs of blown head gasket-puffing white
steam out exhaust, or missing from shorted-out spark
plugs?(always had those syptoms with blown head
gaskets-imports) Problems with the PCV system
can cause the milky oil.If engine was badly overheated
(boiled dry) a cracked head is possible-same symptoms
as blown head gasket...

Rolling Thunder

Well theres a few things that can cause milky oil from a bad head gasket, cracked block or heads, or even a bad intake manifold gasket. How wasily can SBC heads get warped? Under normal circumstances there pretty tough. However it dosnt really matter because it should and can easily be checked if there warped when the heads are off with a strait edge and a set of feeler gauges. Now the most complicated question how hard is it? First this depends on your experiance with working on cars. Personally i could change head gaskets in an afternoon if i had to but then again i would not expect the same of others with less experiance. To me like virtually everything with cars its not a matter of difficulty its a matter of time. If your willing to take the time to read a repair manual and follow it to the letter, lable all your wires, and line up your bolts when you remove to keep track of where they went, may be even snap a few pics here and there to help reassembly it may take a while but its not a that requires a lot of skill. Skilled techs can just do it faster and most importantly do the troubleshooting. So really it depends on you. Do you have basic tools and mechanical abilities and are you willing to spend a huge amount of time on it to see that its done right? If you can answer yes to both without question you can do the head gaskets.

kmd

i might just get some quotes from a shop, between school and work i might not have the time to do it right. it's weird that it happend now, before i didnt have any problem with coolant in the oil until i hooked up the heater core lines.

Rolling Thunder

Well you could always try doing a pressure test on the cooling system if you suspect maybe something was in the heater core or something like that. Might not be a bad idea anyways.

kmd

i'm going to do a compression leak down test when i can, i talked to a buddy of mine who's pretty GM savvy. he told me i could possibly have a set of ported heads that were botched somewhere along the way. he's going to get back to me on that one.

kmd

ok, so here's an update on the situation.
i had the car towed to my school today so i could get to work on properly diagnosing the problem. i pressurized the cooling system to 10 psi, and to my surprise it held pressure without any serious drops or any coolant flowing from intake manifold, freeze plugs, or heads...not a drip. so now the question is how is the coolant getting into the crankcase without the system leaking? my buddy suggested that maybe there's a crack in the water jacket in one of the heads and the crack wouldn't expand until the engine was at operating temp. after i hooked up the heater core line (the only change that occured between NO water in the oil and water in the oil) the engine only idled for about 15-20 seconds before it bogged out and wouldn't start again. so right now i'm in the process of disassembling the intake manifold to see if i can yeild some results from there. however there is a silver lining... my classmates pretty much did all of the disassembly on my intake hehehehe.