Lehigh Acres Auto Repair Tips – How To Check If Your Head Gasket Is Blown

If your vehicle isn’t running right your engine might have a blown head gasket. But how do you know if your head gasket is really blown?

The head gasket fits between the head and the block of the engine so you can’t see if it’s leaking because it’s inside the engine.

You’re going to need one of these combustion leak tester kits, then you perform a little chemical experiment to tell you if the head gasket is blown or not.

It’s a pretty simple test, inside there’s a test tube and some test liquid and the first thing you do is take off the radiator cap from the radiator.

Then get a turkey baster and suck some of the coolant out so there’s more space inside.

You suck some of the coolant out because you don’t want coolant being sucked into the tester, it’ll give you a false result.

Then you take the bottom half of the tester and stick it in the radiator and then pour some of the test fluid up to the line.

Now you put the middle of the test tube on top of it and pour fluid to the second line, then put the top of the tester back on.

Start the engine up then squeeze the bulb a few times. That sucks air in and you will see the air being sucked in.

This is a way of checking for combustion gas into the cooling system. If there is a problem in the hot gases here’s how you tell.

If a blue liquid turns yellow  it means your head gasket is blown.

Since the blue test liquid has turned yellow that means that there’s combustion gas inside the radiator. There’s a crack somewhere inside the head gasket or the engine.

So as you’ve just seen it’s a very simple test with this kit to find out if the head gasket is blown.

You certainly don’t want to take a whole engine apart just guessing, now you know one way or the other.

Remember if you’ve got any car questions just visit us at All About Cars auto repair in Lehigh Acres or give us a call.