Head gasket or cracked head?
 

Alright, I have a blown head gasket in my 97 Z28's LT1...it popped, I drove ~20ft and stopped. How common is it for these engines to crack their heads? I've been calling a couple places to get estimates and more than half of them are saying they can't give me one because they don't know if it's got a cracked head or not.

So...is there anything I could do beforehand to find out?

i would think it is not very common for aluminum to crack, but i could be wrong

Check and see if it's your Optispark because I had the same incident a few weeks ago. I took off the distributor and the rotor sounds like there's loose change in it. Another thing, have you checked the oil when the engine was still hot to see if it was milky? If it is, that's a good sign of a blown head gasket. Good Luck!

There's water in the cylinder and it's pumping it out the exhaust, oil looked fine later that day, I haven't checked it lately. Hopefully it didn't mix with the oil. :yuck:

I haven't read many posts that point to a cracked head; most likely your just blew a gasket.

think the possibility of cracking would only happen if it really over heated bad and then you continue on to drive and even then I think it is pretty tough to crack it... for the shop I think the standard is something like 5 hours labor but I can't remember if that is to do the full job or just pull the heads of?? anyways it would really help if you could diagnose where the problem is.. usually you’ll will detect a miss on a specific cylinder from a OBD code reader or low compression on a specific cylinder if you go the old school route; it is useful to know which cylinder as this can help you figure out which side it blew on as theoretically you can fix it just by doing one side..

Also, keep in mind that water in the engine does not 100% mean head gasket.. if you have full compression on all 8 cylinders but have water in the engine it possible that it is coming form something else like the lower intake

good luck

:confused: No water passes through the intake manifold on a LT1.

yeah when writinging this I don't think I read the sig with the specific car info, sorry think I'm getting old... anyways I was really just talking in genral that when diagonsing things it is always best to make sure that you consider all possible causes and not just get hung up on a first idea... just suprised on this one that he didn't see any coolant/water in the oil,, maybee just got lucky and was very smart to stop almost imeidatley like he said and this probaly prevented further damage