Defender 110 300TDi smoking

Hi,

I am failry new to the Landrover world having bought a 110 300TDi Defender for my wife a couple of years ago. It is her pride and joy and my job to keep it running. I can do most jobs myself but get a bit lost when it comes to trouble shooting. I currently have a probelm with white smoke. The probelm is that it doesn't appear all the time. On start up the, exhaust gives out a good black cloud which clears. If you travel somewhere and then stop the engine but restart in a short time, say 5 minutes, it belches out white smoke which carries on for some distance then clears. If you park up for half hour then there is no white smoke on start.

I did think it was perhaps head gasket type probelms but thought that it would smoke all the time if this was the case. Last week I changed the radiator due to a leak and the smoking has got worse even occurring mid trip though not all the time, might be unrelated, could be more pressure in the system with the good rad ......any thoughts??

glow plugs possibly?

Hi Jeralex and Welcome to LZ! :welcome2:

Is the coolant level still droping now with the new rad or is it completely watertight?

Was the engine run with little or no coolant in it at any time while the rad was leaking?

I'm asking this as it may be a leaking head gasket. After you stop the engine the temperature and pressure of the coolant goes up for a while as does the pressure. After a while the radiator cools down and th epressure drops, so I think your smoke after 5 minutes v a 30 minute stop could be this.

There's a several good threads discussing smoke and what it means, here's one.

http://www.landyzone.co.uk/lz/f7/white-smoke-75961.html

Cheers,

Hi jzcktv,

Many thanks for your response, I 've just checked the coolant level and there is less in there now than before I changed the rad. With the leaking rad the coolant level did drop regularly so the engine would have run with less then it should at times. I sense this is going down the head gasket route......is this a simple spannering job or best left to the experts??

Jeralex said:

Hi jzcktv,

Many thanks for your response, I 've just checked the coolant level and there is less in there now than before I changed the rad. With the leaking rad the coolant level did drop regularly so the engine would have run with less then it should at times. I sense this is going down the head gasket route......is this a simple spannering job or best left to the experts??

Click to expand...

It's a Land Rover... so it's a spannering job, just as it's the HG a long spannering job.

Keep checking the coolant as it might have been an airlock clearing that's caused the fluid level to drop. However I suspect that the reason the Rad might of gone in the first place is due to excess pressure in the system from a HG failure. Just a thought...

Welcome, when it's good and warm compress the top hose coming from the rad, if its really hard to compress then the gases fromù the cylinder are passing into the water jacket pressurising the coolant, if so it's HGF.LEE

Thanks for your responses, bad news though, smoking got really bad and all the advice was pointing to the head gasket. I enlisted some help and got down to the gasket which looked OK. The cylinder head also looked OK but got it pressure tested, this found a crack letting coolant into the cylinder, I am feeling very poor now, new head should be here on Monday, hopefully this will solve my smoking problem.

thanks again for you thoughts