I had my car looked at becasue it wouldnt start the mechanic told me that there was antifreeze in my oil.I noticed a week befroe that my car was using a lot of anitfreeze.I know my engine is gone.I would just like to know what would cause antifreeze to get into my oil. and what would it take to repair this.
I hve a 2003 Ford Taurus with 100,000+ miles on it
I would like to add that the car is attempting to start but it wont turn over…I dont know if this makes a difference or not
You probably have a breached head gasket. This will lead to antifreeze in the oil and can lead to a no start due to lack of compression.
The repair is to replace the head gasket. However, if you have been running around with antifreeze in the oil for a long time then you’d be better off either getting rid of the car or getting a whole different engine or complete rebuild of this one. The water/antifreeze mix in the oil will make a terrible mess of the engine’s bearings.
Didn’t your mechanic tell you this?
Any one of several gaskets can fail and result in coolant escaping into the crankcase. And certainly a cracked head or block could be the cause. In recent years engine design has made such failures more common.
Agree; the only other way antifreeze gets into your oil if someone took a quart of antifreezee by accident and used it to top up your oil. Dumb as this may sound, I’ve seen it happen.
really? well I know I didnt put anitfreeze in my oil…
A breach in an intake manifold gasket can cause this to happen as well. This is less common on Fords, but very common on GM, particularly the 2.8/3.1/3.4 engines. The gasket between the water jacket of a head and the intake manifold can leak into the lifter valley, where it will flow into the sump, mix with your oil, and trash your engine.
I was not referring to you, as the owner, but that pimple-faced high school kid at the gas station, working part time without any training.
In Europe they often pump diesel into gasoline powered cars.
It sometimes works out the other way too. When I was a teenager working at McDonald’s, a guy in an F350 ended up coming from across the street at the Amoco station to get something to eat and figure out what he was going to do about his new car trouble. He had pumped 28 gallons of regular unleaded into the main fuel tank of his Power Stroke F350. I immediately went on break, called a friend, we rounded up some gas cans and a rubber hose, and siphoned all the fuel out of this guy’s main tank. I filled the tank in my '71 Chevy pickup to capacity, and my friend topped up the tank in his S10 with what we got out of this guy’s truck. Both our vehicles smoked a little bit for that tankful, but the guy in the big Ford was grateful for us taking this problem off his hands.
Don’t forget the 4.3. My 2000 Blazer’s intake manifold gasket started leaking at 43k miles. Fortunately I noticed the coolant level drop and my mechanic confirmed the leak before any engine damage occurred. The coolant displaces the oil from the engine crank bearings causing an engine failure.
Ed B.
Yeah, the 4.3 was bad about that too. Anything with Dexcool was bad about that. The passenger car V6s stick out in my mind because I have done so many of them. I have done maybe three of the 4.3’s intake gaskets compared to probably 20 or 30 of the 3.1/3.4 intake gaskets. I finally just started charging everyone $500 out the door for that job rather than the full 5.7 hours labor. On one occasion, I found a substantial external coolant leak on a 3.4L in a one year old Grand Am with 12k miles on it. That car ended up going back to the dealer to get fixed under warranty.