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Doing the work yourself,will give you the up close and personal experience of fixing your car.
Along with the confidence that is needed to take on the next issue.
Read, ask questions, study the manual take your time.
You have the luxury of not needing the car, and no money spent for the car itself.
Ya i do want to do it myself. Thanks for the confidence. On that note though, i am struggling to find a good service manual to follow. i couldnt find one in the sticky page in this forum for my 2004 XJ8 and i tried to get one off tradebit that said it was service manual and software and it sucks. Guess thats what i get for $15.
I'm going to post in that forum page for the manuals, but anyone know the best place to buy a service manual for 04 XJ8 that is actually useful?
In this situation, it may be more cost-effective to locate and install a used engine with lower miles.
I'm confused as to how it would be more cost effective. An engine is at least $1000 and I would need to buy an engine lift which is $200.
isnt it more difficuldifficultn engine swap? i signed I to the topic account but am weary of paying for a section that might not be what I'm actually needing since I cant preview anything.
Update: Lots of oil in the intake manifold, which from what i can see on other forums is somewhat normal ish for it to happen. The air filter in the intake was super nasty so that might be why it was sucking up oil.
Replace your EGR valve / Ground wire to body frame.
Originally Posted by Hyrum Lindquist
I went to autozone to get their OBD test on the codes. It showed the same codes that i got but their tester didnt cause the car to not start or show all the warning signs on the dash. Once again those codes are
P0405 - EGR sensor - as an update with that i found the EGR electrical plug was disconnected. plugged that back in. hopefully that code goes away now.
P1638 - CAN link ECM/INSTM Circuit/Network
P1642 - CAN link Circuit
P1000 - OBD systems Readiness Test Not Complete
I dont see anything that could be connected to a blown head gasket but also doesnt explain coolant loss. Does the P1000 code have to finish doing it's thing before i can get fully accurate codes?
Replace the ground wires to the frame of the car located in the front side panels. This is you can error codes problem. Replace the EGR VALVE this will cause the car to over heat allow water to move into the wrong place.
UPDATE: I have finally removed my head and head gasket. It took forever especially finding the dang tools. Here's a few photos of my heads. Doesn't look like the head gasket is cracked anywhere and I measured the head and didn't find any warpage. Except one spot that had a gap of .125 mm. Thank goodness. The compression test made it seem like an intake valve problem but i dont know what to look for with possibly damaged or problem causing intake valves.
One thing I noticed and not sure if it's a problem but the pistons on the driver side aren't like the other side. It two up and then two down instead of one up, one down, one up, one down.
Im curious as to your thoughts on what you think the problem is after all this now. Passenger side Driver side
Last edited by Hyrum Lindquist; Jun 27, 2020 at 12:20 AM.
Key thing with these all-aluminium engines is to check for block warping if the car has undergone a significant overheating episode. Othere thing I remember from doing a head job on a Rover V8 many years ago, (also an all-aluminium engine), was that the head bolts had to have thread sealant when reinserting and tightening down. The stuff smelt like Evostick so that's what I used ! The reason for sealant was never stated, but I siuspect it was to do with the steel bolts going into an alloy head and thus prevent galvanic corrosion.
So i couldn't see any cracks or failures in the head gaskets. Also measured and don't see any warpage in the heads. Based on the initial leak down test of air coming out the intake and now doi g a water test on the valves I found that the problem is most likely the intake valves that are leaking. There's 3 that are leaking
Leaky inlet valves won't help the cylinder compressions. However, from your original post, the question still is - where is the coolant going ? Looking at the photo of the combustion chambers for the passenger side, the combustion chamber on the left looks cleaner than the rest, and seems to have a break in the ring marking where the gasket fire ring clamped on it just top-left. I assume you have found no evidence of coolant getting into the engine oil, it just disappears with no obvious external leak, correct ?
You wrote this in #27
UPDATE: I have finally removed my head and head gasket. It took forever especially finding the dang tools. Here's a few photos of my heads. Doesn't look like the head gasket is cracked anywhere and I measured the head and didn't find any warpage. Except one spot that had a gap of .125 mm. Thank goodness. The compression test made it seem like an intake valve problem but i dont know what to look for with possibly damaged or problem causing intake valves.
You don't want any gaps ! A light skim of the heads may be needed to restore flatness.
Apropos reassembly, do these engines demand new head bolts as well as a head gasket ? Have you been able to source the parts OK ? It can sometimes be very difficult to see where a head gasket has allowed leakage, so in the end, once everything is known to be flat and unwarped, you just have to clean everything up and reassemble.
Leaky inlet valves won't help the cylinder compressions. However, from your original post, the question still is - where is the coolant going ? Looking at the photo of the combustion chambers for the passenger side, the combustion chamber on the left looks cleaner than the rest, and seems to have a break in the ring marking where the gasket fire ring clamped on it just top-left. I assume you have found no evidence of coolant getting into the engine oil, it just disappears with no obvious external leak, correct ?
You wrote this in #27
You don't want any gaps ! A light skim of the heads may be needed to restore flatness.
Apropos reassembly, do these engines demand new head bolts as well as a head gasket ? Have you been able to source the parts OK ? It can sometimes be very difficult to see where a head gasket has allowed leakage, so in the end, once everything is known to be flat and unwarped, you just have to clean everything up and reassemble.
When i get to fixing everything i will be getting the parts from probably different sources. I've been doing that today and so far it looks like a mixture of amazon, ebay, partsgeek and rockauto. I will be getting the full engine rebuild gasket kit since its just better to replace all the gaskets along with a number of other pre maintenace replacements and fixings.
i will also be looking at some nearby machines shops to see cost of flattening out the heads and how it compares to just replacing the head completely. i honestly have no clue what the problem has been causing for the car. i just hope that making eveyrthing "good" will fix whatever issue there was. i was told the cavitation on the head in the photo i uploaded could be the cause of some coolant loss. i still have the oil in the oil drain tub so im going to double check it for milkiness but im pretty sure theres nothing mixed in it.
