hey yall, stumbled across this site while looking for people with similar problems to what I am experiencing and found a lot of very uselfull information. But my main questions were'nt answered so I figured I'd post my project and ask for advice... so, here we go. My truck is a 91 p/u ext with a 5 speed, 2in body lift and 32x11.5 bfg mt. Its primarily a toy, but i recently moved to washington and found that my crotchrocket isnt very feasable up here this time of year, so I need to get it running. I got the current motor from a kid on craigslist in trade and he said it was running great in one of his yotas 2 days before it was delivered to me. I got it in for the most part and then had to let it sit for a year and a half. now im tryin to get it back running and when i assembled everything it started for about 15 seconds and then shut off... hasnt started again since. so i tore it down and pulled the head off and everything looks fine but theres coolant everywhere! however i cant pressurise the cooling system to check for a leak down low by the timing chain... so what do i do? i feel like im beating my head against a wall here!

 

That sounds normal when you take the head off. As even when draining the coolant from the radiator prior to removal, your not gonna get all of it out of the head.

 

sorry i should have been more specific, im a fairly mechanically inclined however im also mechanically ignorant... this is the second time ive put a motor in this truck so ive got a pretty good idea of how everything goes together but diagnosing problems and such is not easy for me... so heres a more specific description of my problem: when i took the head cover off it was chocolate milk in there, i also have water in the oil but no oil in the coolant... coolant had been leaking out of a heater line and i kept wondering to myself "why is there a coolant line going through the firewall" thats when i realised what the line was and decided to take the head cover off and do an inspection... dumbass i know... but my question is: how could I have gotten that much water in head and cylinders? did I just hook sumthin up wrong? or is there maybe a problem with the water pump or timing cover? any advice would be truly appreciated as i just got the head back from a cleaning and resurfacing and its all good... as was the gasket. Im just lost thanks yall

 

Could be timing cover, you got the engine used so you have no clue as to the recent maintenance done to it. Could be the head gasket and could be the timing cover gasket. If the Previous owner recently changed the timing chain and did not do an oil change afterwards, it's possible water from the coolant system stayed in the oil pan and caused the milkshake, because when you take the cover off water from the water pump and/or water channels in the timing cover are gonna dump excess coolant into the oil pan.

With a situation like this, I would change the timing cover and timing chain while your at it. You can also do a compression check before doing so as well. If the head gasket is bad enough you might have a change in compression in a cyl or two. If you get low compression in 1 r 2 cyls, a true pressurized leak down check might help too. Pressurizing the coolant system generally won't diagnose water in the oil.

 

much appreciated, I will report back with my findings... also it should be noted that the head gasket looked brand new when i took it out, and the machine shop said only minimal resurfacing was required on the head. So I dont think that was the problem... is there anything you can think of that i could have hooked up wrong to cause this happen? There was a LOT of coolant in that thing, and it only ran for about 10 seconds (oblviously because the cylinders were fulll of water). i just dont have a lot of money to drop into this thing right now, and I need to get the thing up and runnin cuz it's sittin in pieces in my parents garage bcuz of the weather. I've considered just junkin the truck, but i love this thing and dont think i could stand seein it go to a junkyard... anyways thanks again for the advice, i'll get the timing cover off tomorrow and run a compression test have a good night everyone