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Hello guys and gals. First post here, but I have been reading everything in these forums for (IIRC) several years now.
I have a 2001 Chevrolet Impala with 190,000 miles on it and I had to (finally) replace the LIM gasket on it recently. Since I have read all of the info all of you smart people have posted on these forums, I knew to go ahead and get the FelPro metal gasket and all of the other little tricks of doing the job. I had no doubts about getting right down to business because I felt like I had already done it a hundred times! So basically, I just wanted to say a big THANK YOU to those of you who post such good information and to the moderators and owners of the site.
Now, some people may think I was crazy to do the LIM job on a car with so many miles, but I take pretty good care of this car. It has had nothing but Castrol Syntec oil in it since just after it was broken-in and I'd really like to see if I can get 500,000 miles out of it. I got over 250,000 out of a Corsica so I think it can be done.
The earliest indication of a problem with the LIM on my car was the appearance of floating sludge in the coolant at about 80,000 miles. I worked over several days fishing it out of the overflow tank. I was also losing a little bit of coolant. So I did some research and found that GM recommended some of their sealant pellets be added to the coolant whenever it is changed or any time major work involving the cooling system is done to the engine. I put 2 and 2 together and figured the sludge was caused by the pellets that GM put in the coolant and it had degraded. Since I was losing some coolant, I went to the dealer and bought a card-pack of 5 sealant pellets and put them in the coolant. I stopped losing coolant, but always continued to have sludge. I wrote this off to "normal", thinking that the folks criticizing DexCool hadn't figured out the "secret" that I had.
So then, at about 189,000 miles, I did an oil change and noticed mayonaisse on the oil filler cap and loss of coolant. I figured it was the LIM problem and even though I knew it would need to be replaced at some point, I figured I'd try to put some alumninum block sealant in the coolant and that seemed to work OK for a few weeks.
I had to rev the engine a little higher than I normally do when I was merging onto a busy highway one day and the next day when I was driving to work (after about 20 miles of cruising), I got the "Low Coolant Level" light. I stopped at a truck stop and checked things out- I had Grey Poupon in on my oil cap! So I went in and bought some other cooling system sealant and water, just to get me to work and back home.
Anyway, I started looking things over and knew it was time to do it right. I took my time and disassembled everything over the course of a couple of weekends (no shop- strictly shadetree mechanicing!)
Here are a couple of pictures of what it looked like when I disassembled it (I won't IMG link them in interest of space):
After a couple of weekends delayed by howling winds and cold weather, I very carefully cleaned everything up and vacuumed out all the icky stuff, put it all back together and PRESTO!!! It started! It still had the original plugs and wires on it so I replaced them while I had it apart so I picked up a little bit of zip in the process. I did not, however, refill the cooling system with DexCool, I put the new Prestone extended life coolant that is compatible with DexCool in it and we'll see how that works out.
So here we are at project completion +6 days and about 400 miles. I have changed the oil and filter twice just to get any stuff out that shouldn't be there and last night I changed it again and put my normal high-quality filter and synthetic oil back in. I don't hesitate to call it a complete success at this point!
Some of you might not think of this as a "big" project, but for someone who was using just a very basic set of hand tools and a new torque wrench, doing this in spare time under a shadetree, it was big for me. And the feeling of success after the job is GREAT!! I love driving my Impala and look forward to many more happy miles in it.
Thanks again everyone!
I have a 2001 Chevrolet Impala with 190,000 miles on it and I had to (finally) replace the LIM gasket on it recently. Since I have read all of the info all of you smart people have posted on these forums, I knew to go ahead and get the FelPro metal gasket and all of the other little tricks of doing the job. I had no doubts about getting right down to business because I felt like I had already done it a hundred times! So basically, I just wanted to say a big THANK YOU to those of you who post such good information and to the moderators and owners of the site.
Now, some people may think I was crazy to do the LIM job on a car with so many miles, but I take pretty good care of this car. It has had nothing but Castrol Syntec oil in it since just after it was broken-in and I'd really like to see if I can get 500,000 miles out of it. I got over 250,000 out of a Corsica so I think it can be done.
The earliest indication of a problem with the LIM on my car was the appearance of floating sludge in the coolant at about 80,000 miles. I worked over several days fishing it out of the overflow tank. I was also losing a little bit of coolant. So I did some research and found that GM recommended some of their sealant pellets be added to the coolant whenever it is changed or any time major work involving the cooling system is done to the engine. I put 2 and 2 together and figured the sludge was caused by the pellets that GM put in the coolant and it had degraded. Since I was losing some coolant, I went to the dealer and bought a card-pack of 5 sealant pellets and put them in the coolant. I stopped losing coolant, but always continued to have sludge. I wrote this off to "normal", thinking that the folks criticizing DexCool hadn't figured out the "secret" that I had.
So then, at about 189,000 miles, I did an oil change and noticed mayonaisse on the oil filler cap and loss of coolant. I figured it was the LIM problem and even though I knew it would need to be replaced at some point, I figured I'd try to put some alumninum block sealant in the coolant and that seemed to work OK for a few weeks.
I had to rev the engine a little higher than I normally do when I was merging onto a busy highway one day and the next day when I was driving to work (after about 20 miles of cruising), I got the "Low Coolant Level" light. I stopped at a truck stop and checked things out- I had Grey Poupon in on my oil cap! So I went in and bought some other cooling system sealant and water, just to get me to work and back home.
Anyway, I started looking things over and knew it was time to do it right. I took my time and disassembled everything over the course of a couple of weekends (no shop- strictly shadetree mechanicing!)
Here are a couple of pictures of what it looked like when I disassembled it (I won't IMG link them in interest of space):
After a couple of weekends delayed by howling winds and cold weather, I very carefully cleaned everything up and vacuumed out all the icky stuff, put it all back together and PRESTO!!! It started! It still had the original plugs and wires on it so I replaced them while I had it apart so I picked up a little bit of zip in the process. I did not, however, refill the cooling system with DexCool, I put the new Prestone extended life coolant that is compatible with DexCool in it and we'll see how that works out.
So here we are at project completion +6 days and about 400 miles. I have changed the oil and filter twice just to get any stuff out that shouldn't be there and last night I changed it again and put my normal high-quality filter and synthetic oil back in. I don't hesitate to call it a complete success at this point!
Some of you might not think of this as a "big" project, but for someone who was using just a very basic set of hand tools and a new torque wrench, doing this in spare time under a shadetree, it was big for me. And the feeling of success after the job is GREAT!! I love driving my Impala and look forward to many more happy miles in it.
Thanks again everyone!
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