Bad night............heater stops working, then shortly thereafter, the engine loses power and starts running incredibly rough. I pull over and inspect...........there is no coolant in the radiator. I put some in, let the engine cool, then drive to my mechanic's shop. The van runs better than it was, but still is missing.

The Mechanic runs a test on the radiator and tells me it has emmissions of over 100 parts, meaning in his opinion that the head is cracked.

Does this sound right or should I get another opinion.........it still runs, but very rough. And there is a large (like pouring out large) leak at the bottom of the radiator.

Greg

 

It is either a cracked head or blown head gasket. Either case, it will require removal of the heads to check. If you're lucky, it's just gaskets, and the heads may be warped. You should ask the mechanic to do a valve job while he is servicing the heads.

Did your temperature guage give any strange readings while this was happening? A giveaway is if the temperature goes up at first, then drops to very low readings. This is the usual indication of lost coolant. To prevent major damage, you want to stop and check things during the first part of the temperature change.

 

About a year ago now my wife called me at home that the van had died on her way home. When I went to pick her and the van up, I found that all the coolant was gone from the radiator. Replacing the coolant I noticed that there was a large leak coming from the water pump. Apparently the water pump had gone bad overheating the engine. How long my wife drove it that way is hard to tell as she rarely seems to look at the gauges, but she said it wasn't hot that long.

To make a long story short, it ended up that both heads had warped and one had cracked and the water pump had to be replaced, all because of a bad water pump that should have been noticed before it caused so much damage.

I am not familiar with the radiator test that you say your mechanic did to identify emissions, but it sounds like you have a leaking radiator or blown lower radiator hose that caused loss of coolant and overheating of the engine. Overheating the engine may have caused the heads to warp or crack, but hopefully it just caused failure of one of the head gaskets as it was still driveable. Have your mechanic do a compression check on all cylinders to narrow down the problem, but if he's going to be working on one side anyway you might as well have him replace the head gaskets of both. Besides, if the engine overheated enough to cause damage to one side (either head or head gasket), then the other side has been stressed also and should at the least be inspected thoroughly to avoid problems in the near future.

Just my 2cents. LOL

Ron