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[mowerman71]

hi all , my beast is not well , went out tonight , pulled away then felt its not firing on all 6 , quick check when got back home, no water in the oil , not really getting hot on temp, but loads of egg smell, then that cleared , then loads of smoke/ steam from exhaust , then that cleared , just got a feeling its h/gaskets, 

[davethediver]

If no oil in water or mayo on dipstick unlikely to be HG, eggy smell possibly CAT is FUBAR

[Darth Loo-knee]

The egg smell will be unburnt fuel in the Cats...Is the car missfiring?  Do you have any codes at all?

Head Gaskets I have seen to be "Gone" use alot water, seen water blasting out of the exhaust as fast as your pour it into the reservoir too

[ScottieMV6]

HG gone on mine. I had no water in the oil to speak of apart from a little more mayo than normal on the filler cap.

I had misfire and loads of steam/smoke out the exhaust. Surefire way to tell is to compression test each cylinder, should be about 15 Bar per cylinder although you are looking more for one cylinder to be a lot different to the others. On mine I had 5 cylinders reading 15 Bar and one reading 19 Bar.

[Elite Pete]

The egg smell will be unburnt fuel in the Cats...Is the car missfiring?  Do you have any codes at all?

Head Gaskets I have seen to be "Gone" use alot water, seen water blasting out of the exhaust as fast as your pour it into the reservoir too

We could have opened a steam cleaning business with that facelift MV6 we bought a youth

[Darth Loo-knee]

The egg smell will be unburnt fuel in the Cats...Is the car missfiring?  Do you have any codes at all?

Head Gaskets I have seen to be "Gone" use alot water, seen water blasting out of the exhaust as fast as your pour it into the reservoir too

We could have opened a steam cleaning business with that facelift MV6 we bought a youth

And we could 

[Wayne]

i have what i THINK to be a lot of exhaust smoke coming from the back of my car when accelerating, though maybe its been the cold weather and im exaggerating?
no misfiring, ever so slight coolant loss now and then, no mayo on the dipstick or oil cap,  Vauxhall obviously said my HG gone so they could charge me a billion quid to do it, since then i have been driving it around for the last 12 months, so it may just suddenly go bang one day i been told, i cant get a sensible answer off anyone, unless i take it somewhere, anyone local on here to Oxfordshire that could put me out me misery and tell me if HG gone, then i can get another car which is what i have wanted to do for the last 12 months, my Omegas been the best car i ever had but just so MANY things that i hear going wrong on it, i spent a bloody fortune on it as i know im not capable of doing half the jobs you guys do without rather the car up 

[Entwood]

i have what i THINK to be a lot of exhaust smoke coming from the back of my car when accelerating, though maybe its been the cold weather and im exaggerating?
no misfiring, ever so slight coolant loss now and then, no mayo on the dipstick or oil cap,  Vauxhall obviously said my HG gone so they could charge me a billion quid to do it, since then i have been driving it around for the last 12 months, so it may just suddenly go bang one day i been told, i cant get a sensible anser off anyone, unless i take it somewhere, anyone local on here to Oxfordshire that could put me out me misery and tell me if HG gone, then i can get another car which is what i have wanted to do for the last 12 months, my Omegas been the best car i ever had but just so MANY things that i hear going wrong on it, i spent a bloody fortune on it as i know im not capable of doing half the jobs you guys do withough rather the car up 

If you had a head gasket gone it would NOT have lasted in that state 12 weeks .. let alone 12 months.

Put it out of your mind .... whatever problem you have, if indeed you have one at all,  it is NOT, IMHO a headgasket

[Koomorph]

Could a HD not go slowly over time.... slowly loosing a bit a of coolant before developing into a larger failure where more coolant is used? I'm only asking as I'm unsure whether when these things go on the miggy... they really go.... or whether it can be a progressive fault that develops slowly over a few months.

[Abiton]

Could a HG not go slowly over time.... slowly loosing a bit a of coolant before developing into a larger failure where more coolant is used? I'm only asking as I'm unsure whether when these things go on the miggy... they really go.... or whether it can be a progressive fault that develops slowly over a few months.

 

Ours got gradually worse over several months, though it's hard to know exactly when it started to leak.  The leak was from the nearby waterway past the fire-ring of No. 4, and symptoms were by no means drastic even when I got the point of deciding to change it. 

Never saw significant white smoke out of the exhaust, never smelt anything untoward in the header tank.  Because the symptoms worsened so gradually (principally related to coolant system overpressurising, hard hoses, leaks and of course worsening coolant loss) I couldn't believe it was a HG problem. I'd always thought they were "good today, gone tomorrow" type failures.

If you want to check if you have a HG problem, or not, here's what I'd do.
Leave the engine to cool for a few hours if it's been run recently.
Make sure your plugwells are nice and dry, take out the sparkplugs, and look down the holes (bright little torch helps).  If there's anything wet-looking on any piston crown, sample it with some kitchen roll on a stick. If it looks and smells like coolant, it has no place in there. 

That's how I knew ours needed attention anyway.

[mowerman71]

thanks everyone for the advice , tomorrow will be d day as a good friend will be doing head gasket test with snap on  chemical change test  via expansion bottle, just got an orrible feeling , but am praying its not , fingers and toes etc crossed . jon .

[Entwood]

thanks everyone for the advice , tomorrow will be d day as a good friend will be doing head gasket test with snap on  chemical change test  via expansion bottle, just got an orrible feeling , but am praying its not , fingers and toes etc crossed . jon .

word of caution .... have the car ever, to your knowledge, had any oil get into the water especially an oil cooler failure

The reason for asking is simple .... these head gasket failure testers actually test for hydrocarbons in the coolant, ie exhaust gases ... BUT any old oil from a previous problem is also hydrocarbon ... and will register...

So you need to be certain that there was no oil in the coolant before you rely on the hydrocarbon test.

[Boatboy]

Could a HG not go slowly over time.... slowly loosing a bit a of coolant before developing into a larger failure where more coolant is used? I'm only asking as I'm unsure whether when these things go on the miggy... they really go.... or whether it can be a progressive fault that develops slowly over a few months.

 

Ours got gradually worse over several months, though it's hard to know exactly when it started to leak.  The leak was from the nearby waterway past the fire-ring of No. 4, and symptoms were by no means drastic even when I got the point of deciding to change it. 

Never saw significant white smoke out of the exhaust, never smelt anything untoward in the header tank.  Because the symptoms worsened so gradually (principally related to coolant system overpressurising, hard hoses, leaks and of course worsening coolant loss) I couldn't believe it was a HG problem. I'd always thought they were "good today, gone tomorrow" type failures.

If you want to check if you have a HG problem, or not, here's what I'd do.
Leave the engine to cool for a few hours if it's been run recently.
Make sure your plugwells are nice and dry, take out the sparkplugs, and look down the holes (bright little torch helps).  If there's anything wet-looking on any piston crown, sample it with some kitchen roll on a stick. If it looks and smells like coolant, it has no place in there. 

That's how I knew ours needed attention anyway.

Thats exactly what I did last sunday, and why a very nice man is calling this sunday all being well.

I had been getting concerned about the amount of steam out the back, but they all do that to a degree. Trick is knowing how much is too much. Ditto for mayo in the filler neck. What finally got me to investigate further was a rock hard top hose combined with a misfire on cold start which had detoriated to general rough running over a couple of weeks and, the final straw, water gushing out the expansion tank when on cold idle.

Steve

[Wayne]

Only topped my coolant level up 3 weeks ago, just come up on the dash COOLANT LEVEL, me thinks its the head gasket as i shouldn't need to keep topping it up all the time, i have checked for leaks and there isnt any, had new HBV fitted recently

[feeutfo]

Only topped my coolant level up 3 weeks ago, just come up on the dash COOLANT LEVEL, me thinks its the head gasket as i shouldn't need to keep topping it up all the time, i have checked for leaks and there isnt any, had new HBV fitted recently

oh Wayne, turn it in.

although...normal asumption is a head gaskit failure means water leaking into the bore/combustion gasses presurising the cooling system. However you have a 98, which seem prone to external head gaskit leak, meaning coolent leaking externaly from hg. Have a look around the back of the pas side cyinder bank where the dis pac bracket is bolted to the engine...or core plug in same area. Difficult to spot though.