Head Gasket?

[BBrinks]

I was driving the other day and the car sputtered for a second and then ran great. It was fine for a couple of days and then started sputtering and missing pretty badly. I got it home and let cool down for a bit, and then took it around the block. About 1/4 mile down the road, it starts sputtering really badly and was blowing white smoke through the driver's tailpipe.
I started taking it apart tonight and pulled the front drivers spark plug (no. 1?, can't remember) and it was wet. The rest were fine. Would this be a blown HG or a lower intake manifold leak? The oil was clean and the reservoir wasn't boiling over or anything. Also, I haven't done a HG before, should I just replace both while I'm at it?

 

[Guero]

when i was blowing smoke, it was the head gasket, im getting it fixede now. and yes do both while your at it

 

[slow50sally]

Mine was leaking radiator fluid in the back, I hope mine is just the lower intake. I have helped my friends with 93 and 90 gt and pretty easy to work on. Just make sure you have a torque wrench.

 

[95CobraMike]

did you start to see the white smoke during regular driving conditions or were there some WOT runs in there resulting in the white smoke?

ususally you dont just blow a head gasket during normal driving conditions

what is your timing set at and what gas do you run?

are you actually losing coolant or oil? is there coolant in your oil or oil in your coolant?

something to think about....maybe your spark plug went bad or your plug wire... i think if you had a bad plug or wire or something, that your spark plug would be wet with fuel and you would probably get smoke out of your tail pipes from the unburnt fuel burning up in your exhaust....
i'd look into that first and do a compression test on your cylinders

BTW that is cylinder #5

 

[BBrinks]

I run 87 octane and the timing's set to the stock 10 deg. I was just driving normally when it started blowing white smoke out. It wasn't just a little bit, though, it was pouring out pretty good. I haven't run a compression test yet, so i'll try that and see what comes up.

 

[BBrinks]

Well I took out the lower intake and here's what I found:

And here's the intake:

I thought it might be the head gasket, but now I'm wondering if the manifold gasket was causing it. The only spark plug that was wet was the #5 one, and that's about the only one where the intake manifold was chewed up like this.

 

[Zero Signal]

Oh yeah that's bad news. Hopefully it wasn't like that for too long, saturating your oil with coolant.

 

[95CobraMike]

whoa!! how does that happen?

 

[BBrinks]

I do the oil changes myself and it's never had any indication of coolant in the oil. Even now there's no coolant in there. I only drove it around the block when it started smoking so hopefully it wasn't long enough to do anything. The gasket's pretty nasty though, so I don't know if just an installation problem or something else. I bought the car with the intake already installed. Hopefully this cures it.

Does anyone know where to order the upper-to-lower intake gasket from? I looked on trick flow's site but only saw the lower kits.

 

[95CobraMike]

you can get that one from like auto zone or advanced for i think $16 or something like that