Possible bad head gasket? Confused. Topic is solved

[Gtin]

Grrr, not sure why I did NOT see this post earlier.

I don't think you had any issues with a head gasket. Glad you found the source of your coolant leak, likely the firewall coupling. Stopping that leak likely solved your coolant loss issue.

I was wondering the same, but the idle had certainly gotten rougher before I did the treatment (something I didn't share, as I did the treatment two nights later) and it seemed to smooth out as well as my milky substance fading away with no change in the distance I was driving it and no cleaning of the pcv. so I'm curious if I somehow had both problems going on, at any rate it seems okay now. I'm currently trying to get my heater core back into the loop without creating the leak again

[scot850]

There is a thread on here on bypassing the firewall connector and going direct to the heater core.

Neil.

[Gtin]

I'll look into it for sure. What I found today was that the top hose wasn't clicking into place completely. There was what I believe to be an extra o ring jammed in there by a previous owner between the clip and the first plastic spacer. It was the only piece of the seal to come out with the hose I couldn't get the others out but it seemed to have a thinner clip as mentioned in a Robert DIY video indicating that the first thing after the clip should be a plastic spacer. When I removed the o ring the line clipped fully into place.

The question is why was it there unless it was an attempt to fix a previous leak. I may still have a slow leak but for the time being it's fixed enough to give me heat through the week as it's supposed to be getting down to about 19 degrees here in the next couple days. For now I can deal with topping it off as needed until I get another warm day.

[rspi]

I have come to the conclusion that the odds of the firewall cracking when the hoses are disconnected is pretty high. I doubt that I will try to pull those hoses without replacing the firewall coupling. Yet another "built broke" situation.

[abscate]

This is an older post, And a rare occurrences of someone saving a head gasket leak with Bars coolant system sealer

[Gtin]

Actually abscate. A little update to that. Something about like 3-5 months ago the oil started getting milky again, all symptoms came back and got worse. So the bars really only really bought me a little bit of time, I had planned to do the head gasket right this time until I wrecked it about 2 months ago.