So last night I was driving to see my girlfriend and I stopped at a light andmy car was surrounded by white smoke coming from the exhaust. I pulled over to check it out and it was the sweet smell of coolant coming from the exhaust. Of course today was the day I had to come back from school for the thanksgiving break. So i had to put my car on a tow truck and get my dad to pick me up. I feel like im 15 again without a car and it sucks lol...

So how bad is it to replace the gaskets? I really dont want to pay to have a shop do it? I was planning on putting in a new cam, rockers, lifters, the whole deal this winter and i know that if i have to take the heads off to do this it would be a good time to do the cam swap but i dont have enough time to do it right now so i think id have to wait till christmas to be able to work on my car.

 

What motor? That will determine the odds of how screwed you are.

Big job in the grand scheme of things and depending on what actually went bad, your going to have some investigation into what is broke before throwing new parts on.

 

its an LT1

 

First off your gonna want to know which side puked. Then you'll have somewhere around 15-20 hours of work to get everything apart. Focus on the side that went bad. Send the heads off to be checked for damage. Look over the block and cylinders closely to see if any wear or tear damaged the walls.

Might as well do both sides while you have it apart, which looks like about 20 hours of work, about the same amount of time as it takes to pull and install a motor.

Lot of work and I'd clasify it as a 5 on the difficulty scale of 1 being easy and 5 being most difficult to get right.

 

[:@] ill have to agree with willie. if your not paid to repair cars id leave this one to those that are. mind you its not exactly rocket science but if you dont have 10 -20 grand in tools and dont have the experience and reference material( NOT chiltons and haynes) id advise against tackeling it yourself its really not a fun one kurt

 

Ditto bro. I would just have the engine rebuilt because it might cost about the same as having some one pull the heads. Your call though. Good luck.

 

Ive heard its around 1400-1500 average for a shop to fix it... I have all the tools needed to do the job and i have rebuilt an engine before but it was in a '67 olds where u can almost stand in the engine comparment while working on it. My father has worked on cars and hotrods all his life so he'll be helping out. I think were going to try and tackle it ourselves. It will be my project when this semester is over and im home for a while. Anyways the car just got here today and my dads gonna take a look at it later on.

and btw to put some icing on the cake when the guy who towed the car here took it off the flatbed this morning he bent my exhaust tips [:@]

 

You'll be fine then. Just take more time to look things over and have things checked out. In the long run it might not be a bad idea to just yank the motor to do the job. That way if the block is fubared your halfway there. If it's not, at least you can drop the pan, clean things up, and have a peak at the rod and main bearings.