Please HELP ME!!!! Burning Oil smell..

[NuTTs]

Hi all,

I've recently had a few small coolant hoses split and dirty my immaculate engine bay.. I've replaced the hoses and flushed the cooling system the best I could. I also had a problem with mayo-like gunk in the cooling system, which was diagnosed by  rubjonny (thanks mate) as an oil cooler failure.. all the crud is out of the cooling system now (i think). So I've refilled the cooling system with 50/50 antifreeze and water and have followed the bleeding methods listed in the forum and all the hoses get hot as they should. No more bubbles come out of the expansion tank so I thought all was fine.

I then took the golf for a drive (1991 8V GTI) and when I came back there was coolant gurgling and spewing out of the expansion tank!!! Also there was a smell of burning oil in the engine bay with associated smoke. I opened the oil filler and it was red hot.. smoke was coming out of the filler cap!!

Now I've had my share of VW's and all have had cooling issues- but this is just plain scary. What am I doing wrong and what could have gone wrong??

The car has always worked fine during the past year and a half that I've owned the vehicle but all of a sudden I'm having these problems. The heater stopped heating all of a sudden also so I thought it could be an airlock in the cooling system - any thoughts?

I'm worried I may (or may already have) fried the head gasket!

Please give me any thoughts you may have...

Regards,

Kurt

[rubjonny]

Check your radiator fan is working, easiest way to do this is unplug the connector at the bottom passenger side of the radiator, and bridging the pins on the plug.  The fan should come on slow & fast speeds.  Then run the engine till the temp gets to just over half way, the fan should then cut in at slow speed.  If not, the sender in the rad is buggered!
It may be your waterpump has failed, when you rev the engine do you notice coolant flowing out of the coolant return at the top of the header tank, where the thin hose connects?

[NuTTs]

Hi Rubjonny, the fan has always worked until the coolant hoses ripped a couple of weeks ago on both speeds. When I rev the engine with the expansion cap open coolant doesn't flow from the return pipe but it "raises up" in the expansion tank. The most worrying thing is the burning oil - I really hope I don't cook the motor on this baby!

As tomorrow is a bank holiday in Spain I'll be at home and I'll try re-flushing and filling the coolant and bleeding it to the best of my ability. could the expansion tank (round with blue cap) easily split... as the coolant that spills out of there is under a black plastic cover.

Regards,

NuTTs

[rubjonny]

The tanks can fail, but the caps are a far more common weak point, so worth replacing.
Next I'd disconnect the thin pipe from the header tank and blow through it, just in case it got clogged up with oil or crud.  If it gets blocked it will prevent your coolant system from bleeding properly, as this is where any air bubbles are forced out to the header tank.

Check the rad fan again just in case its decided to blow up at the same time as everything else

[NuTTs]

Cool.. thanks for the help. I´ll get to that in the daylight tomorrow.. although I do have the urge to get the worklights out on the driveway and start working now!

I´ve been searching through the archives and past posts etc. and found quite a few people have had the typical - cold radiator, coolant seeping out of expansion tank, heating not working, low coolant light flashing.. the problem is that no two cases seem the same or have the same solution.

I think this topic would be great to have as a sticky with the definative solution (once we find it).

I´ll let you know how I get along.

Regards,

Kurt

[NewStu]

I assume you did replace the oil cooler and drain and re fill your oil?

[rubjonny]

If there was alot of coolant in the oil it might be an idea to do that (mayo under the cap)  But normally there wont be as oil is under much higher pressure than coolant in the cooler so oil will only get into the coolant, not the other way round.

What little gets into the oil is soon burned off after a good long drive

[NewStu]

Either way if its failed it needs replacing. To do so you would need to drain the oil anyway.

[rubjonny]

indeed, but its ok to leave it for now while he fixes the other problems. Mine was like that for months!  Problem was I lost quite a bit of oil out of it, so basically it had several sumpfulls of oil thru it before I ripped the bottom end out for my 2.0 conversion

[NewStu]

Cant say id want to run my coolant as oily sludge for a month! not even a day!