V6 head gasket

if it ran good before and you didnt overheat it replave the gasket

I agree with Mark. As long as you caught the blown gasket early without having the car overheat, you should be ok for just a gasket replacement. My wife's camry ('92 XLE) had a blown gasket just recently as well. Unfortunately, she ended up driving it around unknowingly for quite a while afterwards. I think what happened was it went undetected because she only does short local trips with this car and it was never really driven long enough to get a big overheat under this situation. I also found a crack in the top plastic part of the rad, which would have caused coolant loss. I don't know if it was a loss of coolant from the cracked rad that caused an overheat which then caused a blown gasket, or the rad was stressed from the coolant temp/pressure from exhaust gases in the cooling system. Doesn't matter now. :)

I ended up doing a leak-down test and pulling the affected head, only to find a pitted block surface around the affected cylinder. So I decided in this case to go with a new, used low mi. engine (and new rad). It cost me $2500. The car was in good shape otherwise. If I was to do this again with my own labor, I think I would have just tried to replace the gasket and filled the block pits as best I could and take my chances due to the age/book value of the car. A used engine for a V6 should not cost more than $1200 or so not including labor.

Dave Mc

Agreed!