I have 97 Buick century with 91000 miles and it weeps from the head gasket. I heard this engine was notorious for this problem but to do a head gasket job for complete repair seems a bit steep considering the value of the car itself. Some say put Stop Leak in the cooling system. Is this stuff any good or am I just prolonging the inevitable?
If you are going to use a additive to stop the leak I highly advise blue devil, its $$$ but it works. With that said I dont know if it will fix your type of leak, as its not on the combustion side of the gasket… Maybe someone else can chime in…
Are you sure it’s the head gasket and not the Intake Manifold???
I don’t care for stop leak additives. They may clog up some areas of the cooling system. How bad is the “weep”? On an older car adding a bit of coolant now and again is cheap. One thing to do would be to retorque the head back to specs to see if that has any effect.
As Mike says, are you sure it’s a head gasket and not an intake manifold gasket? Intake manifold gaskets are not too expensive to fix; I had one done on a V8 Chevy for $165 or so. That was a while back but you should not spend more than about $200. If it’s a head gasket, I’d go with a leak stopper in view of the car’s age.
I’m sorry. Yes it is the intake side. DUH. My shop said to tear down you might as well do a tune up, water pump etc, and we are talking 800 to 1000.
GENTLY torque down the manifold bolts and try some stop-leak. You have nothing to lose…
I just replaced the intake on my Buick about 2 months ago, cost $90 for the manifold with gaskets and took half a day, its not a hard job if you have any skills turning a wrench.