Hello, I just bought a '95 Camaro with the 3.4 v6 and 5-speed. The previous owner said that his mechanic had diagnosed a blown head gasket on the car; as soon as I brought it home I did a compression test on it and all the numbers were in the 180-200 psi range. The car has 86000 miles. To my knowledge, those compression numbers are too good for a blown head gasket, but when I changed the oil, I got some curious symptoms, namely that the oil was thin and runny and was brown(not black) in color with cloudy swirls of slightly lighter brown.

The car sat outside for 6 months or more before I picked it up, and hadn't been started once in that time. The owner brought it to the mechanic because when he was driving it to work it suddenly lost power (he said it felt like it dropped a cylinder) and then stalled out completely a couple times not long after. I replaced the plugs and wires; one of the wires broke when I removed it and I suspect it as the source of the dropped cylinder. Before I did the compression test I started the car and ran it and even drove it, and it had full power again and gave no evidence of having a dropped cylinder as the previous owner had described. The plugs all looked the same, and they all looked black as if the car had been running rich. When I put new plugs and wires in and ran the car some, I later removed one of the new plugs and it was so clean it was hard to tell it had fired at all (but there was some evidence). There is a very little bit of vapor out the tailpipe until the car warms up.

Any ideas as to what's going on? I'm wondering whether the thin oil comes from gas in it from the cylinder that apparently stopped firing or if it's coolant from a crack in the head or the block. I should also note that I found some moisture on the underside of the oil filler cap. Thanks for any help!

 

You should try running the car maybe the vapors go away after a while if they continue sounds like you have a head problem maybe its cracked but the crack is not visible a similar problem happened to my brothers car he had water or coolant in his oil. Hope that helps

 

The vapors do go away once the car has warmed up. They're very faint when it's cold anyway. The only time there was a lot was when I first started it up after it sat for so long. I'm saving the crack theory for last resort; apparently if I'm getting coolant in the oil at all it might be from an intake gasket or something. I've seen conflicting information, does the 95 3.4 have cast iron or aluminum heads?