TD5 Head gasket blown.

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RobCSH

RobCSH

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Just got back (and I mean just) from hoiday in France.

Broke down in Toulouse, loss of coolant, Green Flag (useless tossers) eventually get a guy out who recovers it to his workshop, apperenly a Land Rover specialist. I get a hire car for 5 days (Toyota Yaris??!!!) and they then call to say it's fixed.

The guy tells me that he couldn't find a fault with the car, he's re-topped the coolant, run it round 3 times, checked for leaks and found nothing. The only thing he did find was a chunk missing out of the fan belt, which he changed.

By the time I got back to Bordeaux, I had noticed that the coolant level had dropped slightly, so kept my eye on it.

An eventful journey back to say the least, stopping to relieve pressure out of the system, and keep the levels correct, I've managed to get the car back home. Wife and kids ollow on a plane next week, as I didn't wish to risk the journey on all of us.

So go on then, how much do you recon to fix?

Rob

BTW, when it is fixed, it's gone. It's been nothing but a pain in the arse since we had it and I wish we'd never sold the Volvo, that had got to 187000 miles with no drama.
 
The dowels in the block are made of plastic and this causes the head to move on the block and break the seal of the head gasket, usual signs are blowing coolant from the expansion tank or excess pressure in the cooling system.

I did one a few weeks ago for £350 including parts. It will cost you over £600 from a dealer.
 
The Mad Hat Man said:
werent there a mod to replace the plastic dowels with metal ones, Clutchy?
Click to expand...

I am sure there is.

Its the same situation with the K series engine(Freelander 1.8 etc) they fitted plastic dowels to the earlier ones. Recently did the head gasket on our MGF (also 1.8 K series) and the plastic dowels were extermely loose in the block/head, the head must have been moving about all over the place. Now replaced with tight fitting stainless steel dowels.
 
Hi me the hypochondriac again.(New clutch no clutch)
This 4 month to me 99 Disco I now have gown to love through all the faults.
Coolant system pressure, what is normal & how do you tell? When normal running temp my hoses are quite firm.
It's getting to the stage where I'm afraid to drive it. But she's nice to look at.
Russ.
 
This is a 2000 TD5 ES auto and has just rolled round to 92k. I'm going to get the job done, and then it's going.

It was a choice between this and a V70 D5 SE, we had the Land Rover as we've has several Volvo's and wanted a change, but what a mistake that has turned out to be. Never again though, already looking at V70's to change into.

Rob.
 
The pressure in any cooling system will be about 12 to 15 psi, which is quite enough if it was in your tyres to keep them up till you drove home.

The hoses will usually feel solid (and bloody HOT) when the system is up and running.

CharlesY
 
Rob, you can read about lots of 1999-2000 (and over) Td5s suffering from blown gaskets around 80sh k miles or so. Do a search for <Td5 plastic dowels > or <Td5 head dowels> on the net and you'll find lots of reports. Also for <Td5 blown (head) gasket> (every time without the <>). Read also about the head dowels (you will find the tech note about were your VIN falls and if you'll replace them with plastic or steel dowels).
If you can't find much, let us now ...

Sorry to hear you decided to sell it because of that. Now somebody else will benefit from your misfortune and enjoy it. About the Volvo, the old one: I wonder what year was it. Sorry for offtopic.
 
cipx2, I've had serveral Volvo's, probably due to the fact I work for the truck side of Volvo. The last one was an 850 T5 estate, cracking car never gave any problems, but I've also had 360, 460 & 480 models, with no major problems. Infact the only problem I had was water ingress to the rear footwells on the 480.

Yes, someone may get the use of a good car after it's repaired, but as I've already had the indicator relay fail o/s, the injector harness fail, now a head gasket failure, and it p!$$£s in water through the sunroof, all this after just 3 months of ownership, I really dont think I'll bother keeping it. There is a feeling all the time that it's just going to fail again, and judging from all the fault I've now read in here, there's plenty of scope for more headaches.
Also, the main use for our car is to go to the south of France, at least twice a year, something that I've found the Land Rover won't do at a reasonable pace, overtaking lorries has to be planned, and it just doesn't have enough go to it.
The only positive note's I can say for it, is there is plenty of room in it, and it was comfortable, especially for 3 hours waiting for the breakdown truck. My 10 yr old son likes it, but then he isn't paying the repair bills is he?

Maybe I've just got a bad one, but from what I've read here, it does seem par for the course, and for a vehicle that cost over £34k new, I find it pretty abismal on the build quality.

Hope you all have better luck than me...!

Rob
 
Terry, do you own a Red w reg MMLE by any chance?

Charles, a fountain of water out or the header tank whan running and the hoses blown up like balloons, yeah, I'd say it a head gasket, unless you know of another reason why the cooling system would still have presure in it even after the car is left to go stone cold.
Obviously I took it easy and stopped at regular intervals to check it over, and top up as reqiured, and didn't wait until it got hot first.

In fairness, I don't think it's gone major, or I don't think I'd have made it home, but it's there all the same. From Bordeaux I stopped at Tours, Rouen, Calais, Dartford and Coventry. Used 8 litres of water to get home in total, suppose I'll find out how bad when I get the head off. Which I'm not really in any hurry to do yet.

Rob
 
Yep thats me, glad you got home ok, I think my minimal fluid loss is down to a leak in the rad (he say's with fingers crossed), but I phoned up a LR specialist and he said that it should cost about &#163;5-600 for a head gasket which when you consider that it would have cost 300 for a Rover 100 2 years ago I didn't think it was that bad............but then I hope its the rad,

was yours showing any signs of over heating?
 
The only time it got hot was in Toulouse, after that I knew there was a problem and kept an eye on it. It did start to go above norm at Coventry, which was the last time I stopped and it took the last of the water I had with me, then OK for the last run to Tamworth.

Yeah, I thought I was a lucky bugger too Charles!

Rob
 
RobCSH said:
Just got back (and I mean just) from hoiday in France.

Broke down in Toulouse, loss of coolant, Green Flag (useless tossers) eventually get a guy out who recovers it to his workshop, apperenly a Land Rover specialist. I get a hire car for 5 days (Toyota Yaris??!!!) and they then call to say it's fixed.

The guy tells me that he couldn't find a fault with the car, he's re-topped the coolant, run it round 3 times, checked for leaks and found nothing. The only thing he did find was a chunk missing out of the fan belt, which he changed.

By the time I got back to Bordeaux, I had noticed that the coolant level had dropped slightly, so kept my eye on it.

An eventful journey back to say the least, stopping to relieve pressure out of the system, and keep the levels correct, I've managed to get the car back home. Wife and kids ollow on a plane next week, as I didn't wish to risk the journey on all of us.

So go on then, how much do you recon to fix?

Rob

BTW, when it is fixed, it's gone. It's been nothing but a pain in the arse since we had it and I wish we'd never sold the Volvo, that had got to 187000 miles with no drama.
Click to expand...


I know how you feel, I got my first disco' (TD5 Auto GS on a 51 plate, 70,000 miles), on thursday last week, that same day it decided to lock me out (remote c/l packed in), then when it did let me in (with the alarm blaring) it wouldn't start.
Two days later, on the saturday, we found out that we had a leaky roof. Roughly 2 drips / second.
Yesterday we found that the air con doesn't blow cold.
This morning we set off from the house to pick up our caravan from the storage place down the road, we got 100 yds from the house when we heard a small "clunk", then the engine died and won't restart.

I too have had Volvo's for years without any prob's,for the last 5 years I've been driving a 1989 240 DL with close on to 200,000 miles, original engine and box etc. Never had a problem, sailed through every MOT.

Luckily the garage I got it from seem to be quite helpfull, and appear to be playing ball at the moment. One more problem when the disco' gets returned, or if they decide they want any £££ for getting it sorted, I'll be demaning my 11K back and I'll go and get myself an XC70.
Rapidly going off the idea of owning a landy.

Stu.
 
Rob, now I see your point.
In fact I think you shouldn't have bought it in the 1st place. For the main use u specified, I don't think the Disco or any other (permanent) 4x4 is the right answer. The disco is not designed to be a motorway cruiser. As for overtaking without too much planning, these days you need at least 75 BHP/tonne. Not even the V8s don't get close enough to that figure, let alone the Td5s.

On the other hand it seems you didn't do your homework to well before going for a Disco 2. Or maybe you said to yourself that it can't happen to you (or at least not as often). Here is a post on a forum that concentrates most of the (expensive) problems on the early Td5s: TD5 in the desert . That's why I chose a 300Tdi. As for LR being a fish tank, I don't think there's a LR forum where you can't find reports about that, this one included (that's why I didn't take the disco with sunroofs - one thing less that could give me headaches).
My point is to say that if you want to get another vehicle, try to read as much as you can/find about it.
IMHO these days you have two main alternatives:
- a used vehicle with no or not much on bord electronics, cheap and easy to find parts, easy to repair with not many special tools, or
- a brand new vehicle with as many warranty years as you can find/afford, 5 would be great, which you're going to sell before warranty expires, usually a year before.
Anything else would be like a bit of gamble. Some win but some have to lose.

As about the Volvo's you mentioned .... geee .. those were great cars made when vehicle manufacturers used to build cars, not PCs on wheels like they are doing now. You simply cannot compare the reliability of two cars, one made before 1995 and one after 2000. Those years, I mean 70s 80s, a car was build to last and now they are built to be sold.
Those years you used to refill a pen when was out of ink, today you simply get a new one.
 
cipx2 said:
Rob, now I see your point.
In fact I think you shouldn't have bought it in the 1st place. For the main use u specified, I don't think the Disco or any other (permanent) 4x4 is the right answer. The disco is not designed to be a motorway cruiser. As for overtaking without too much planning, these days you need at least 75 BHP/tonne. Not even the V8s don't get close enough to that figure, let alone the Td5s.

On the other hand it seems you didn't do your homework to well before going for a Disco 2. Or maybe you said to yourself that it can't happen to you (or at least not as often). Here is a post on a forum that concentrates most of the (expensive) problems on the early Td5s: TD5 in the desert . That's why I chose a 300Tdi. As for LR being a fish tank, I don't think there's a LR forum where you can't find reports about that, this one included (that's why I didn't take the disco with sunroofs - one thing less that could give me headaches).
My point is to say that if you want to get another vehicle, try to read as much as you can/find about it.
IMHO these days you have two main alternatives:
- a used vehicle with no or not much on bord electronics, cheap and easy to find parts, easy to repair with not many special tools, or
- a brand new vehicle with as many warranty years as you can find/afford, 5 would be great, which you're going to sell before warranty expires, usually a year before.
Anything else would be like a bit of gamble. Some win but some have to lose.

As about the Volvo's you mentioned .... geee .. those were great cars made when vehicle manufacturers used to build cars, not PCs on wheels like they are doing now. You simply cannot compare the reliability of two cars, one made before 1995 and one after 2000. Those years, I mean 70s 80s, a car was build to last and now they are built to be sold.
Those years you used to refill a pen when was out of ink, today you simply get a new one.
Click to expand...

Totaly agree with you cipx2!

After driving VW/Audi's for 20 years the last A6 V6 tdi put me through so much hassle,cost (far to much to mention) that I decided to sell (lost half it's value in 3 years/took 3 months to sell)

Have a look on some of the Audi forums out of curiosity,unbelievable electronics problems,tip-tronic gearboxs going pop at 50k!How much do you think they are then?I've read tales of people spending thousands & thousands of pounds on their smoking A4/A6 and still not cured the problem.

I now have a very rare (sun-roofs dont leak) 300tdi which in just under a year has done over 10k,down to Spain twice,back to the north of England and has never let us down up until recently when the gearbox went (still got us home)This I was half expecting as last owner never did a box oil change in 8 years.Got a re-con from the U.K for &#163;600 including transport etc to France.Absolutely transformed the vehicle,smooth gear change,no whine/noise-Well happy:)

I understand that you are ****ed off rob and I would be too but it could have happened to any body in any make of car the examples are endless of people that get stuck at the other side of the country because there ecu packed up or hundreds of Renault scenic owners that had to form an association to take Renault to court over premature cam belt rupture due to a failing plastic guide bearing-They won!!!!!!etc..............

Sorry mate,Hope that you get it sorted.

Good luck

Jason
 
Yes I did do my homework, I was aware that they suffered certain problems, as any cars might. I also consulted poeple I know that owned them, one who's on his 3rd disco who does europe, and he hasn't had any trouble (lucky bugger).
I don't drive like a looney, (the H doesn't stand for Hamilton...) and the main reason for a 4x4 was all the snow sports we do, it would make life easier (so I thought) for going up mountains in poor weather. Maybe as I said before, I'm just lucky eh? but I did pick the 3rd option and bought it from a dealer, so at least I'm not paying for the repairs....

One point in it's defence... it's got the best stereo I've ever heard in a car...

As for the modern cars, try a V70 D5, we have 3 at work, one's just cleared 200k and has only had regular servicing, and tyres.

I think we'll be going to the Pyrenee's with a pair of Rolls Royce's this year, strapped to the side of a 737/400...

Rob
 
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