antifreeze concentrations and leaking water pump

No reason to believe that Peak's universal long-life is the same as Prestone's All Makes All Models - i.e., "marketeer's buzz words" does not equal "chemistry". They may in fact be the same, but just because they use similar non-technical words to describe it is no indicator to me of anything.

AFAIK, Peak was not a party to the DexCool disaster. However they certainly were aware of it - and maybe that was your point (relating to my comment that I can't see them making that mistake again).

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

Reply to
Bill Putney
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It's worse than I thought. The dealer refused to change out the coolant. It's already mixed with the oil. They suggested a new engine instead. The water pump is leaking but there is an internal leak also, either the head gasket, the block or who knows what, but the leak is there so pointless to change the coolant.

I wonder how I destroyed the engine in 9 months. What do you all think?

  1. The engine has 200,000 original miles on it, actually, 203,565 miles.
  2. I let the oil go for 9 months and 3,000 miles, so mostly little trips.
  3. I put in 1 quart of SAE 30 to top off 5W-30 semi-synthetic Conoco-Phillips.
  4. What else I do? The coolant came up with a pH of 8 so I let the coolant flush go for another year, probably making three years total, at least. I suspect the coolant shot the water pump. Maybe coincidence but old coolant, even with the right pH, can do that because of particles in the coolant - or so one person said. Could bad coolant ruin the engine? I did not think so but?

Was it all a coincidence or is this a big mea cupla idiotus time? To put in a junky yard 3.0 liter Mitsubishi seems risky since many of them may have the same problems or other problems. To put in a Chrysler reman engine for $2660 + $1200 is not doable right now although it comes with a 3/36 warranty. But that's the cost for another used vehicle or two or three - is it not?

Reply to
treeline12345

I find it utterly beyond amazing that you're thinking in terms of dollars and cents when you're facing senseless-dollars wallet rape by the dealer.

I've said it before and I'll shout it again: YOU ARE STUPID TO TAKE AN OLD VEHICLE TO THE DEALER! THEY DO NOT WANT TO WORK ON IT, AND WILL THEREFORE GIVE YOU A SUPER-HIGH QUOTE IN HOPES YOU WILL EITHER GO AWAY OR BE DUMB ENOUGH TO PAY IT!

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

You're wrong, therefore you're angry, says an old quote.

In the beginning, only the dealer was willing to correct the first major problem, the reprogramming of the transmission, a couple of years ago. The local mechanics were not interested. Not only did the dealer charge me a paltry $37 for this but they also fixed two items under recall that I had not known about. Sure that may be federally regulated but still, I had asked the local mechanics about reprogramming and that was beyond their ken or their interest. I had also asked an independent tranny shop and he waffled a bit which made my think that this particular dealer would be relatively and comparatively honest, which this particular dealer was, in contrast to the usual dealer reputations, apparently.

Now if you are correct, you are stating that mechanics will be willing to work on this vehicle? And what do you suggest is a fair price for:

  1. water pump leaking for sure. so timing belt and water pump replacement.
  2. problem of coolant in the engine oil. how to diagnose or work on this without tearing down an engine? is it possible. a pressure test was already done.

? I'm all ears.

Reply to
treeline12345

First, confirm that you actually have motor oil and not transmission fluid in the antifreeze. Check the dip stick carefully for signs of coolant there too. One can check to determine if it is a defective head gasket. If the head is not warped, merely pulling the head and installing a quality gasket is not all that expensive. If you have a cracked block that is another story. Your expensive dealer should have been able to tell you if it is the gasket or not. Go somewhere else for a second opinion. Long oil changes will not warp the head or attack the gasket. The wrong antifreeze or going too long on a flush will not attack the gasket. Overheating can/will warp the head.

Richard.

Reply to
Richard

Why would I be angry? It's no skin off my nose if you choose to be stupid with your vehicle and your money.

No. You're right. I'm wrong. You've got a very special one-of-one Chrysler minivan that cannot and will not be worked on by anyone but a dealer. Parts can only be had from the dealer. Labor can only be done by personnel specially trained in secret procedures, and who know the secret password needed to order parts. Forgive my previously having misleadingly suggested that your Chrysler minivan is exactly the same as the millions of other Chrysler minivans all over the world equipped with your same powerteam. What *was* I thinking?

Around here, the rough "over the phone" ballpark for labor and parts including belt tensioner is $475.

Step one: Find a competent tech who will *diagnose* the problem, rather than taking the lazy way out and saying "Get a new engine".

Step two: Learn that there are many, many degrees of "tearing down" the engine. Removing the heads to install new head gaskets scarcely counts as "tearing down" the engine.

And quotes. But not much brain, as it seems.

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

Ordinarily that'd be a wise first step, but in this case it's unnecessary; we know 'cause the dealer already told him he needs a new engine, and of course a Chrysler dealer's going to be 200% scrupulous and honest when dealing with a 12-year-old van with 200K+ miles on it.

Not necessarily true. Dex-Cool (OAT coolant) will attack the gasket.

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

I have not chosen anything so your ranting is strange but par for your course.

I had to go to the dealer anyway for a state inspection. This time and last year, the dealer did not even charge me for anything extra, not even a windshield wiper. Around here, inspection is when most unscrupulous and even scrupulous mechanics get their windfall. This is quite rare because I am completely vulnerable at the state inspection.

I did not lose anything or chose anything. I got an oil change and an inspection and a suggestion from the dealer for an engine change. Now dealer is an abstraction for people, that is, featherless bipeds. What was the "dealer" today happened to be the assistant service manager who is, well, out for the money. There are over six service writers. I expect this particular assistant manager to be greedy, fine, but he was not so bad but bad in that he is not inclined to fix my vehicle. I doubt whether the other service managers would have been so heavy handed. This mechanic today did not want to work on my car, which is fine, because that also meant he did not want to add to the state inspection list. He could have found things wrong if he tried. Hard not to in any old car.

By the way, he did not even charge me for the little test they did, the presure test. Even if a mean, low-down dealer can feel a human impulse, maybe you could some day? Try it. You may like it. You can always go back and get your old eeprom. I had a Toyota dealer not want to work on an old Toyota but the particular bum of the service manager, the green team (as opposed to the white or blue team there) charged me $90 to tell me. So this Chrysler dealer was far and away extremely honest about not charging me any money as compared to the Toyota dealer. Well, the Toyota dealer or rather that green team service manager was just plain wrong. He said my little Toyota which got 37 mpg was going to self-destruct. It did, about 60,000 miles later. Not bad for an old car I bought for $400.

My, my, my, aren't you being sarcastic, or is that ironic or sardonic. In any case, this dealer is one in a million, hyperbole aside, in three years he has charged me less than others. My finding his discount coupons helped this.

I think the above is an ad hominem argument. But it's true. Most of my brain, unlike yours, is connected to auditory fibers. I'm built like an owl, all ears and eyes. It's a genetic defect and so kind of you to point that out. As always, I try to enjoy your innate hostility. Why? I think you put your anger into finding out all these facts that are about cars. Myself, I'm into brains and minicolumns and things like that. I am stupid with cars because I prefer other difficult problems that I am familiar with. Cars are not my forte. If I could, I would just walk or bike. Unfortunately that is not possible for some time.

I think you are so rude because deep down inside you care :)

I'll separate the wheat from your chaffing. Your suggestions are good. Your delivery could use some polishing.

Reply to
treeline12345

So did the Walmart SuperTech brand of coolant attack my gasket? It apparently has the organic acids as par for 5 year coolants. What do you wizards say?

Reply to
treeline12345

Actually, your both right. And I don't think Dan is angry since this is the same advice he gives as do I, over and over again when this question comes up.

Here is the lowdown. In a big city with lots of dealers that is very competitive the dealerships make money doing 2 things - selling cars, and doing warranty work that they stick the factory for. As a result the mechanics work all day long on

2-3 year old vehicles. They hardly see a 5-10 year old vehicle and since their skill set is so rusty on the older vehicles, as Dan says they really don't want to have to spend all the time to drag out the old service manuals and have to remind themselves of all the old service procedures. Also in the big city there's lots of independent mechanics and enough top-drawer customers who use them, that there are a fair number of good independent mechanics that won't gouge you and do good work.

In a small town it's different. Usually there's a single dealership and they only survive if they take a cradle-to-grave approach. If they start screwing people over then word gets around quicker than snot and they are sunk.

Since there's a lot more people in big cities, most people that post here are from big cities and the big city advice applies most of the time.

OK. First of all, to update firmware in a trans computer takes a tool that costs over $5,000. The dealers are required by the factory to have this tool but I strongly doubt that any dealer that has purchased the flash equipment has, in fact, ever broke even on it. Consider that for either the local mechanic or the dealer, that it costs them about $25 for the overhead of having a mechanic just to lift the lid and look at your car engine for 5 minutes. They probably realized a profit of maybe $10 on flashing your transmission. For a $5000 tool, well do you really think a local mechanic is going to flash update 500 transmission computers to break even on this tool? I certainly don't.

And as for the tranny shops, their standard MO is to take your trans computer and send it out to a "remanufacturer" who ships them a trans computer that's been cleaned up and flash-updated to the current firmware. They don't flash-update trans computers. Even if they could justify the expence, about 1 in 50 of those trans computers will probably blow chunks in the middle of the flash update operation and become scrambled, then the trans shop is out $300 for a new computer. While the local dealer will simply ship stuff like that back to the factory under a warranty claim and let the factory eat it - after all, it was the factory bugs that required the computers to be flashed in the first place, let them eat a new computer cost. The trans computer remanufacturers don't care about stuff like this when it happens since they get piles of computers from the local wreckers for real cheap.

So, you are putting way more stock in this trans computer update thing, and are not aware of the economics of it.

Here's the thing on your engine. It's toasted.

If you have been driving around with coolant in the engine oil for more than a few weeks, your rod and crank bearings are shot. Water does not lubricate these bearings, water and oil mixed does not lube them, only pure oil lubes them. That is why the dealer wants to sell you a remanufactured engine. They don't know how long the water has been in the engine oil so they are going to rightly assume the worst.

At this point your cheapest honest alternative is to simply keep topping it off with coolant and drive it until the engine seizes and tosses a rod through the engine block. Then scrap it and buy another one, or get a new engine. The wrecking yards are stuffed full of the 3.0 mitsubishi engines that are perfectly usable as rebuildable cores, the wreckers can't give them away, they are worth more as melted down iron than as engine blocks. In fact, the wreckers also have a plentiful selection of

3.0 Mitsubishi engines that are still running, and simply swapping your blown up engine with one from a wrecking yard is also a cheap alternative.

Of course, the cheapest dishonest alternative is to change the oil and immediately sell the vehicle while it's still running and let someone else deal with the problem. That is probably what most people in your situation would do. It is underhanded, but on the other side of the coin if any prospective used car buyer were to ask in any chrisler online forum if the 3.0 Mitsubishi engine was an OK engine to have in a used vehicle they would be told to run away, run away.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

Once again you are completely ignoring common business practice.

The reason you didn't get charged for any of this is that the dealer knows your engine is about ready to seize. If they do any significant work on it and there's a paper trail, then a week from now if your engine seizes your going to be back there claiming they "broke" your engine, waving around the receipts from the last work they did. Then they are now in a situation where if they don't give you some significant goodwill you could run out of there and tell all your other idiot friends that they "broke" your engine and now don't want to make good on it. Since you have the paper bill showing that they did something, right before your engine exploded, most mechanically inept people would probably believe that the dealer caused your problem.

What the service writer wanted and the mechanic too, was a paper trail showing that you came in, got inspected, and they touched nothing. This gives you a green inspection card so when you go to sell your vehicle you will be able to unload it. It gives them some deniability since when the van explodes in the lap of the new buyer, if that person would be dumb enough to come to the dealer and chew them out for passing a van that was ready to blow up, they can say with perfect seriousness "the state inspection laws don't tell us to check for water in the oil and the owner didn't say anything about any problems, it's not our fault that we passed a van that blew up a month later"

And, if you don't answer the clue phone, and are stupid, and hang on to this vehicle, then when the engine does grenande, you have nothing that you can carry back into their shop and use as leverage to try to get a free engine out of them.

Naturally the dealer would probably prefer you sell this vehicle, so that you will bring your next vehicle into them for service. They have already told you you need a new engine, most people with a clue by now would be figuring out how to sell it. If your clue phone rings you will sell this vehicle now, while you still can get some money out of it, thus not be pissed off at the dealer, and will then probably be bringing in your next vehicle to them. The dealer knows all this and their attempt to move out of the killing zone, and make it easy for you to move out of the killing zone if you use your brain for a change, is intended to keep you happy and coming back to them. That is good business. They want your money, and they know if they make it difficult or expensive for you to get rid of this van, that your going to end up dumping all your money into tow bills and depreciation loss, and have nothing left over to spend on them or on any of their used vehicles they may have on their lot. Your money right now is tied up in this van, they want you to liquify the van for as much money as you can get, then bring the money to them. Duh!!!!!

Who in God's name takes a $400 car to ANY mechanic, dealership or otherwise? $400 cars should only see the inside of 2 places: the quickie lube, and your garage if you happen to be a car guy who actually knows how to do significant vehicle service work. If you lost $90 there well that was the "stupid" tax that they assess on stupid people who don't understand that a $400 car for most people is like a big bag of toilet paper, you just use it up until it's gone.

Look, right now you have 2 options, first is to sell your van for $2K and buy another, or to drop $2K into a reman engine. The dealer probably has $2-$3K minivans on the lot right now, and they certainly have $2-$3K remanufactured engines available now. In other words either choice you pick they stand to benefit by $2-$3K. Only a really stupid dealer would scuttle that by nickel and diming you now.

So far your story has really only proven your dealer has some smart horse sense. It does not prove that they will refrain from deflating your wallet if they get the chance. If you do give them the chance to do that, you will probably get an OK deal - you won't get the best deal in the world, but you won't get screwed over - but they will definitely get your money.

The US capitalist system is setup in a fashion to make greed benefit both sides of a transaction. Greed is very reliable, you can always count on the opposite party in a business transaction wanting more money. The seller wants lots of money in exchange for his product, the buyer wants to save lots of money in exchange for buying from the seller. That is the stark truth of it. Smart sellers make sure their buyers are sufficiently fat with money to bother with, smart buyers make sure their sellers have something to offer in exchange for their money. You are being rediculous when you are trying to aspire the milk of human kindness to a business transaction - wake up and smell the coffee, it's black!

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

wow replace it.! i red some O my god they like to write!!!

Reply to
multycroner

Thanks for all the detailed and logical info, certainly makes a lot of sense, but this post, apparently later, seems to suggest the opposite course of action of the first post, which is to unload the car before it explodes, well, seizes.

What would you do? Would you sell a car that is about to self-destruct. If you don't want to state publicly, an email might do. I'm curious. I really do need the money since I can't afford the repairs. Interesting. Will the screws make me sell myself out and behave like most others, assuming most people would unload a bum car.

The owner before me could not sell this car to an unsuspecting buyer. Her concerns turned out to be unfounded somewhat. She is also truthful. The tranny was going to self-destruct again, but after a lot of research, on this newsgroup and Allpar, I was avoid to prevent that [TCM update] and did get 33,000 miles out of the tranny so far.

Reply to
treeline12345

Today I saw a master mechanic. Surreal the difference between all these people are a real life master mechanic.

He was not afraid to work on the engine but he was cautiously optimistic.

But what would it have hurt to do a simple diagnosis, noninvasively :) The master mechanic did not say he would have to tear down the engine to get a feel for what is wrong.

Without even an appointment or any connections between us, this master mechanic took out a penlight and a mirror as dentists used. He said in this particular engine if the coolant had reached the bearings, they would have been toast because there are not any anti-corrosion protections on them.

But he could not find in his cursory analysis, any evidence of condensation on the valve cover. This he did while standing in snow outside in the parking lot. He then looked at the PCV valve and did note with the mirror and light a noticeable white ring, like a bathtub ring. This he said might be due to the coolant but he has seen it with old cars without the coolant leak. In other words, it appears that the coolant has not touched the bearings so maybe it is head gasket. Even that though may be a major repair for me. And he also has seen the 5 year antifreeze toast head gaskets and cause various other problems. And old coolant, even 2 years old, also harm the engine because it has lost its anticorrosion properties. So maybe I did damage or hurry things also by not changing the coolant, or rather, forgetting to change after I decided to.

He knows these engines but first he wanted to check up, especially on an engine with 200,000 miles on it. His place had an awful lot of cars for repairs, very neat, and nice new cars.

So there is some slight hope. This particular mechanic also has a reputation for truthfulness as well as competency. He can also explain what he is doing. Very refreshing. I had forgotten about him until the posts here. So I appreciate all the help. I just wish when you help people in distress you don't say, heh, you're being dumb and stupid. That doesn't help in the long run for asking advice. Not so much you, Ted, but that other fellow :) I wish I could help out the mechanic as he helped me just by being polite and considerate and unusually intelligent and competent.

Reply to
treeline12345

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