HOORAY!!! MY MINI BLEW ITS HEAD GASKET!!!!!
Well that seems like a silly thing to celebrate. Of course there is a story behind it. I have three cars in various states of being broken. Fortunately my wife’s Honda is brand new so no problem there but I am getting close to having nothing to drive. Years past that would not be a serious problem, I could just run wherever I needed to go but not anymore. First the Locost has yet to run longer than 45 minutes without the fuel pump quitting. Normally it stops closer to 15 minutes which makes it a bad choice for going anyplace other than the grocery store one mile away.
My daily driver is a 2005 Volvo wagon with 118,000 miles on it. It has been totally reliable for the past 6 years that I have owned it, needing nothing other than tires, brake pads and oil changes. It threw a couple of OBD codes recently and has been a bit funny at idle. Searching the Volvo forums resulted in a laundry list of parts to change in order to fix it. Tonight I’ll pick up an O2 sensor, fuel filter and set of plugs. The plugs aren’t on the list but I’m pretty sure that they have never been changed so it’s about time. I’ve watched the Youtube videos on how to replace these parts and it looks like a long, frustrating job. The fuel filter is supposed to take over an hour. I can do the one on my Mini in less than a minute if I don’t mind a little spilled gas. By the time I get those new parts on the car it might still have the same codes so I can move on to replacing the MAF, fuel pump and fuel pressure sender.
Last week the Mini developed a nasty miss. I came on suddenly and the car barely runs. Last night I decided that the other two were too painful to look at so I’d diagnose the Mini instead. Things looked fine with the ignition and carb so I dug out the compression gauge. Cylinder 1, 30 psi. Cylinder2, 30 psi, Cylinder 3, 180 psi. Cylinder4, 170 psi.
The head gasket between 1 and 2 had blown. In an hour I had the coolant drained, everything off the head and the head unbolted. Here it is just before I went underneath to unclamp the header so I could get the head off.
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Not only had I found the problem and pulled the head, I even had a gasket set in the attic!
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Tonight, after getting home with the Volvo parts, I will put the new gaskets on and have the Mini back on the road. I might have a total of 3 hours into it, including time spent finding the compression tester and searching the attic for the gasket set. Yes, the old Mini is less reliable than the new computer controlled, electronic stuff but at least it is easily fixed.