It's gone now, but a few weeks ago I picked up a 98 GMC Yukon for a couple hundred bucks that was draining it's coolant into the oil. Figured what the heck, it's cheap enough - I'll do a quick top end rebuild and have a 4x4 to drive around in snow.
Well it wasn't the head gaskets, but the notorious plastic intake gasket failure that caused the milky oil. 227k miles on what seem to be original gaskets and terrible coolant.
The rest of the gasket that's far away from the coolant passages maintained it's integrity, but everything that was in relative contact with coolant, turned into mush. Haven't seen any pictures of this on the web, so here they are.
This is where these 5.7 Vortec motors have problems with intake gaskets.
Can see where the gasket broke and had water seeping into the oil galley. Felpro makes a metal/rubber gasket set for these that is essentially invincible. Torque everything to spec and you have a bulletproof 5.7 Vortec.
Truck didn't overheat, no bubbling coolant, etc. So I was confident it wasn't a head gasket. Put everything together and no more coolant loss. Life is good.
So I've essentially gotten fed up with the raspiness from the straight pipe that's in place of the factory cat system on the ole 97 E300. What I found was this stainless 2.5" in/out diesel cat from Magnaflow to use as a replacement. It'll be installed in the factory position and should hopefully rid the exhaust note of a loud and annoying rasp from 2500-3200rpm. I'll try taking a proper video of the exhaust note before this goes on.
I guess there's other benefits, like soot control and less smell..... but all I care about is the sound and this was cheaper than resonator options lol
My 97 E300 stalls while running normally. It can be on the highway at 70 or just sitting at idle, stalls are completely random. The engine just stops. I can try to restart it, but depending on the try, it will not immediately restart. The glow plug lamp with not light up while immediately trying to restart. With a couple tries, the lamp will light up and the car will start normally and function perfectly.
I started with the typical, K40 replacement with new OEM MB: http://artisanexcite.blogspot.com/2016/08/w210-daily-diesel-k40-replacement.html
Problem persisted. After checking the entire engine bay thoroughly, I noticed the SOV was leaking a bit and I bought a replacement. Figured two birds, one stone at trying to solve this stall problem.
Here's what I got:
Can see the connector has had some fluids seeping though.
Anyway, NONE of that solved my stalling. It became so frequent that I stopped driving the car for a while. I went after it again today and while poking around with the engine running it died on me! Not knowing if I'd done it, or the car being random I waited for it to start and I did exactly what I was doing before........STALL.
EXCELLENT.
Here's a vid:
I took the cover off and low and behold I've found my problem!
It wasn't the K40 as I had said, but the connector I was poking! GO FIGURE.
For those looking at solving their random stalling, please direct yourself straight to the K40 relay. It's a power distribution relay for multiple systems. They go bad every so often and they're cheap to replace. In my instance, A wire to pin connection in the connector failed and was giving me intermittent problems.
