20 valve turbo coolant loss

[tom winter]

on 10/6/04 7:35 AM, McCohens at aol.com at McCohens at aol.com wrote:

> I am seeing an empty burp tank every morning on my wife's 91 200Q.  No leaks,
> no white smoke out the exhaust.  A pressure test showed a small drop over time
> but nothing that terrible.
> 
> My mechanic is hesitant to take the car in as he has seen cracked heads on
> these in the past and has had problems finding good ones as a replacement.
> 
> Any other experience in this area?  Never saw this sort of issue on the list
> before.  If my mechanic is correct what is the going rate for a good head.
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This is my guess, maybe a bad one, but I suspect that your head gasket is
going bad. Sometimes it can take a while before the thing totally blows. I
had the same thing happen (and I think this phenomenon was discussed last
month here) on a 5000 tqa. The coolant kept going missing, and I couldn't
figure it out. Until the gasket blew, and then it was pretty obvious what
the problem was! You may also start to see failures in the cooling system
because pressure is getting dumped into the system. In my case, the
expansion tank was leaking a bit, from the cap and the seem of the tank. My
initial response was, "oops, time for a new tank." Wrong! Others have
reported hoses blowing off, etc. The car ran slightly hot, too.

So, you may not need a new head. But if you do pull it to replace the
gasket, I would certainly suggest a valve job. I don't think heads are as
hard to find as your mechanic thinks. But that's another story. . .

Good luck

Tom