My cars fan recently died out and it over heated while i was not in the car. All the coolant leaked out of the resiviour cap and there was white smoke everywhere. When i ran to turn the car off after taking out the key the car still did not stop so i had to put it in first and let go of the clutch to stall it out. The good part through this was that it didnt seem like there was any imidiate damage. The radiatior is still fine and after filling it back up there are no leaks. However the car is running real rough right now. At low rpms it very "jittery" for lack of a better word. I called up a mechanic friend of mine and he says that it sounds like the head gasket.
My question to you is if anybody has any opinons on this, any ideas what the problem is?
Also if it is the gasket how hard is that to replace myself?
Any help is greatly appriciated.

 

with no mechanical expierience it will be a rough job, you have to remove the rocker arms. i would suggest letting someone with expierence do it...you could make an expensive mistake....you should also have someone run a leakdown test and a compression test..so you can acutally see if it is a blown head gasket, also change the oil....you cooked it, if you wanna do it yourself drain out your radiator, remove the bolts inyour exhaust manifold, remove the bolts from your intake manifold remove the valve cover remove the rocker arms (keep them in order) pull out the pushrods (keep them in order) buy a new gasket, buy new headbolts, buy a torque wrench, buy a new intake manifold gasket, look on the comp cams website for setting the preload on you lifters. see what im saying its a pain in the *** oh and torque the headbolts in the proper sequece, if you cant find the torquing sequence just torque them from the center bolts to the outer bolts

 

Take a look on the oil dipstick (or the underside of the oil fill cap), & see if you see anything that looks even remotely like "chocolate milkshake"-looking goop. If so, then you've got coolant & oil mixing together which is a REALLY bad thing. (You can also take a look at the inside of the radiator -when the engine is cold!- to see if you can see any signs of motor oil there.) If you see any of the above, do not run your engine any more than you have to.

I've had a head gasket go "bye bye" on me, & from what you've written, it sounds like it's happened to you as well. If you have little-to-no mechanical experience, it's probably a real bad idea for you to try to fix this one yourself, there are a number of "gotchas" that can come back & bite you in the butt (head-bolts being torqued correctly, oil leaks at the back of the intake, etc.)

One other idea I had that might help you save a few bucks - if possible, you might think about taking an auto course at a local community college. IIRC, you can use their tools to fix your car while the instructor watches over your shoulder to (hopefully!) keep you from making at least the worst mistakes... (Of course, you may need to take some intro classes first, in which case you might as well just pay someone w/ experience to fix it.)

Good luck.