ok guys last night pretty much confirmed my idea of a blown gasket. for the past month my car would hesitate(sp?) and stumble in the upper rpm band, and under a load in 4th gear(automatic) around 50 mph. i was thinking it could be dirty fuel injectors and fuel filter. well i brought the car in to my family's mechanic to chase this problem down. well i also had a cooling problem, the cooling fluid would just disapper(sp?). no puddles around the car when i would park, and no smoke or evidence that it was leaking under the hood somewhere and burning off by hitting the manifolds. well the mechanic opens the radiator cap and he sees all this gunk in there, he replaces the radiator and the water pump and everything looks fine. he also replaces the spark plug wires and plugs and checks the coil packs as well. everything looks ok here. well i still had the stumbling problem but not as bad. this was 3 weeks ago. last night my car overheats and come to find out i have no fluid in the radiator. fill it up with the engine at a high idle, and take it for a drive. no my car is missing real bad and is backfiring. the only thing i can see is the problem is that i have a blown head gasket which is letting little bits of coolant into the combustion chamber and is burning it off (which explains my missing coolant issue). in turn this also causes the car to stumble. now this only happens under a load or under pressure. anybody have any ideas. sorry for the long post but i am stumped on this problem. thanks, Chris

 

a good way to confirm is to check your oil to see if there's coolant in it. And vise versa.....check the coolant to see if there's oil in it. You can also check your plugs to see if they're wet and smell like antifreeze. Even better, do a cylinder compression check. If it doesn't hold pressure........that's pretty much a given.

 

Yes, check your oil and have it pressure checked. Then you'll know for sure. Does it smoke around the heads at all?? Also, coolant is an enemy to the engines internal parts. I would have it checked ASAP!

 

yes last night it was smoking around the back of the engine. also i am going to bring it in tommorow and have it tested. i read in a corvette magizine that the way to tell if you have a blown gasket is to take a emission exhaust probe, open the radiator cap and hold it above the open radiator, being carfull to not splash it. run the engine at a high idle and check the hydrocarbon levels emmiting from the radiator. guy says it is pretty much foolproof. has anyone else heard of this method, seems to make sense to me, cause if there is a leak then it would show up as excess hydrocarbons.

 

Yes, checking the hydrocarbon levels will be a tell tale method of checking a head gasket. Take it to a local smog check station and do a Pre-test on it.