Transparent Auto Repair. Reimagined for Everyone.

It is ALWAYS a good idea to take a car you are interested in buying to a local mechanic for inspection. Here at Columbia Autoworks, we get the used car sob story almost every day. This particular customer spent close to $5,000 for the car, and bought her self a money pit.

It is common practice among dealers to sell aesthetically pleasing cars with a whole host of problems. As a dealer, the way you profit is buy getting the cars sold with as little expense as possible. Head gasket problem? They won’t fix it. They’ll dump in more coolant and let you discover the problem later down the road. Brake problems? Forget about replacing the rotors. They’ll put the cheapest $10 dollar pads on the car and sail it away.

This particular car had been diagnosed with a leaking head gasket. To add to the already expensive problem, the car had a pending check engine code (previously erased), leaky radiator, bad brakes and rotors, and leaking brake lines. We snapped a picture of the head gasket leak from the bottom of the car:

This car was also way behind on basic maintenance. The timing belt, idlers, pulleys, and water pump needed to be replaced as well. Its a good thing the customer had a budget to fix the car. Without it, this car maybe would have last another 3 months tops!

Radiator is out, and the heads are on its way out.

Heads are out! Now its time to bring it to the machine shop to get it milled and checked for leaks. Machining the heads gives us a flatter surface and insures a proper install of the head gaskets.

Our heads are back from the shop! New as the day they came off the lot! Now onto the timing belt assembly.

Water pump, pulleys and idler installed. Fresh intake manifold gasket! Cams at top dead center

This car is finished! Sorry we didn’t take pictures of the rest of the service. There were literally too many pictures to post!

If you’re looking for a mid-size truck, Toyota makes great product. These Tacoma TRD trucks are among some of my favorite to drive and work on. This one came in with a water pump leak, and we’re going to fix it right. Water pump, timing belt, cam seals, crank shaft seal, tensioner, and idler pulley! Just another day at the shop.

LET THE DIS-ASSEMBLY BEGIN.

See the crusty red stuff? That’s where the leak is coming from!

Cam seals going in and prepping the engine block for a new water pump.

Parts arrived! Brand new components! Lets breathe some life into this car!

All moving components in. These were the last of the pictures. Someone needs to remind me to take more pictures to tell the story.

Hello Everyone! Don’t mind this test post. Its from our previous shop Columbia Autoworks! Currently testing our blogging features.

It wasn’t until about the end of the entire process when I had realized I hadn’t taken a picture of the actual car we were working on. We’ve been hard at work this tax season, and I guess I had mixed up a few of the pictures of other jobs into this post! I really wanted to talk about this job because I feel like the mass majority looking for information on this job could use it. The pictures are just too descriptive!

This car came into the shop the other day needing head gasket work. Not only that, but the car was reportedly spewing all of its oil out from the bottom side of the motor. A peek on the bottom side of the engine shows a few different signs of head gasket wear.

See the grey matter between the block and cylinder head? That is a mixture of wet coolant and exhaust fumes escaping from the exhaust headers. When looking for a head gasket leak, the most obvious thing you can track down is coolant on the bottom side of the right and left cylinder heads. In the last picture, the white milky droplets are formed when the oil (spewing out from the bottom side of the motor) mixed with coolant escaping from the head gaskets.

It looks like we found the culprit for the massive oil leak. Looks like maybe the guys at Jiffy Lube might have mis-installed an oil filter and caused the gasket to slip! Good thing it wasn’t coming out of the crank case!

So the tear down begins! Here is our motor completely out of the car. Heads are out to the machine shop to get resurfaced and tested.

Back from the shop like straight from the Subaru factory. Now we will prime the cylinder heads and adjust the valve timing.

Theres a great deal of cleaning and scraping when preparing the block for a new set of head gaskets. The old head gasket will be scraped off, and the sides of the block need to be polished.

If I ever suggest buying a new radiator with your head gasket job, and you find it a little excessive, this is the reason why. Not saying everyone does it, but majority of people cross their fingers and dump in head gasket sealer into the cooling system before having the professionals solve their problem. A $35 dollar bottle of “blue devil” will not solve your head gasket problems. It will in fact, create more damage and create more work for the mechanic who in the long run will have to clean it out. The problem is this stuff rarely ever comes complete out of your radiator because of all the bends and turns. Over time, this copper sediment will clog your radiator- hence, new radiator.

Fresh head gaskets in! Love that Fel-Pro Blue.

Torquing the head gaskets. All of the bolts need to be tightened in a specific order, and then tightened back down to factory inch pound specs.

Before

And after!

Keep in mind this is maybe half of the job! Here at Columbia Autoworks, we do things complete (we may fudge on the picture taking). On this job, we installed a timing kit including water pump, tensioner, idler pulleys, both cam seals, front crank seal, rear main seal, valve cover gaskets, intake manifold gaskets, exhaust manifold gaskets, radiator, upper and lower radiator hoses, thermostat, and radiator cap. Im sure theres more that went into it as well, but- its 7:20 pm. Im signing out.