mayo on end of glow plug 300tdi

finally got round to changing my glow plugs, and noticed that the plug nearest the front of the car (no1?) had the dreaded mayo on the tip of it. the car has been down on power slightly, and using a bit more fuel than it used to, and its been losing a small amount of coolant (1ltr over 2 months) but apart from that there are no other problems. no mayo in the oil cap, heaters are still warm, and no other leaks or problems and only a small amount of white smoke on start up.

is this mayo something i should worry about? is it the head gasket on its way out? or is there another known cause for the dreaded mayo just on 1 glow plug and nowhere else??

cheers, Mark

Sounds like the water is leaking into the cylinder. The oil (to make the mayo) can come down the valve stem or in via the turbo.

cheers for the reply Andy. im not overly worried about the oil being in there, im not using any oil at all so pretty confident thats not a problem and probably just some residual oil from an old problem i had. would the coolant getting in be a HG failure, and is this common? or could it be something else like a cracked head or water pump problem or something else? really dont wanna rip the engine apart unless i absolutely have to!

I have to say that taking all the evidence together it certainly sounds like HGF to me.

cool cheers mate. soon as i get some time il whip the HG out and change it. may as well do the cambelt while im there. is it worth sticking a new water pump in while its stripped down? and anything else i should replace while its easy and everythings in pieces?

Cambelt and water pump are pretty good precautions.

Get the head lightly skimmed and lap the valves in again. Valve guide oils seals etc. If you have the spare cash do things like hoses and crankcase breather and so on.

When you do that cambelt, if you find that you don't have the later mods then makes sure that the crank sproket has a shoulder. The better ones are a single cast piece, some just have a spot welded 'collar'. When you are there also do the two crank oil seals, one in rear timing cover and one in the front timing cover. There is also a retorqueing of the rear timing cover that you can do which also helps with the timing sprocket alignment. I did all that to D71 Disco when I did the cam belt.........didn't stop him dunking it or the inner wings rusting

Thats all I can think of this time of night......been a long cold day......but feel free to get in touch if you need any help/advice/whatever.