Cold/Warm start issues -- bad head gasket?

[DMCVegas]

Interesting-- do you happen to know of the best way to test/check to see if this is a fuel system problem or a head gasket problem?

Quick & Dirty: Pressure test the cooling system to see if there are any leaks. If there is something big, it'll show.

Slower but guaranteed: Send an oil sample off to Blackstone for analysis. They can tell you about the internal health of your engine, and if you are at the early stages of a coolant leak.

http://www.blackstone-labs.com/

I've checked the resistances across the thermotime switch, and it checked out. Since it's warm outside now, I suppose I could disconnect it and try to start the car. I'm just worried about trying to start it if there's a lot of coolant or something in it and locking the engine up.

You won't lock the engine up. Hydrolocking is when you submerge the engine and suck in liters of water at once that cannot be compressed. So it bends the connecting rods. Also, even with water in the oil, there is still oil lubricating the internal components. Granted you probably want to keep the driving to a minimal until sorted out.

For what its worth, I've always had to periodically add coolant to the reservoir. I've also always known that if I fill it any more than 1/3 of the way full, it'll just blow out of the overflow-- never knew if that was normal.

While that could be the symptom of a bad headgasket, it could also be the symptom of a bad radiator cap. If the spring or rubber on the cap has perished, it will squeak out tiny amounts of vapor as the engine is running, which will drain the coolant out. So the next question is how old is your radiator cap?

I can drain the oil from the car and inspect it. If there's coolant in it, I wonder if I could notice if there's a separation of coolant and oil.

The water may be emulsified in the oil, and will definitely be if you've warmed the engine up to temperature before the oil change. So it won't be like you see huge water droplets floating in the drained oil.

I will however give one word of advice: I don't know what kind of nasty chocolate milk, or milk shakes people grew up drinking, but oil from a blown headgasket looks nothing like that from my own experience. It definetely doesn't look normal, but it also doesn't look like a foodstuff. The color spectrum varies, so it may go from a dark brown, to a brownish/whitish pus color. If you have a bad headgasket, the one place you'll see it is your oil cap. There is a steel filter in the cap that filters the crankcase vapors before the enter into the intake manifold. That's where you'll really see sludge start to appear once it gets bad enough.

But to start, if you're concerned about a blown headgasket, do the oil analysis before you tear-ass into the engine so that you're not firing money blindly at this issue. Otherwise the other question is how old is your fuel? Because crap performance and white smoke seems to be the hallmark of sitting cars. For that, I'd dump a bottle of Techron in the tank, shake the car, and then burn through a couple of tanks of gas to see if you've got a change in performance.