[J-Ri]

2001 Impala 3.4 L

I bought the car from a customer, it came in with a number of issues, and he decided not to put the money into the car, so I got it pretty cheap. The biggest problem is the lower intake gasket leaking coolant (appears to be external only at this point). The car has 195,000 miles on it, almost all highway from 70,000 miles when he bought it. It's been maintained well, and he's always had the work done by us, so I have all the maintenance/repair records and I know the work was actually done and was done right. Surprisingly, in that 125,000 miles, the intake gasket hasn't been done. I'm also fairly sure it's never overheated, he said it's never overheated (the reason he brought it it was the thermostat is stuck open and he had very little heat). He has been "topping off" the coolant, but he indicated that he never let the reservoir get empty (I heard that through the service writer, so I'm not entirely sure. I'll ask him myself when I pick the car up later today. Anyway, it's a very nice car for the age and miles (middle-age guy driving it on business trips). At this point I plan on driving it while I build-up the engine in my Cavalier (and probably take a few months to polish the supercharger, intake manifold, and fuel rail to a mirror shine to match the valve cover). After that, I may sell it, but I do really like these cars, and I may keep it for rainy weather and snow. Plus it would be nice not to have to drive my big ol' 8MPG truck if/when I break my Cavalier at the track. So I may own the car for a few months, or until it rusts apart.

How often do the head gaskets fail on these? I've done, literally, thousands of lower intakes on these. The shop I work at doesn't do head gaskets (just a rule, doesn't matter how simple the job is), but I'd say 1 in 100 cars that I do the lower intake gasket on comes back still overheating and I send it somewhere else for them to do the head gaskets. It also seems like the only ones with bad head gaskets are the ones that were extremely overheated repeatedly. Given the poor communication (to put it nicely) between the service writers and the technicians, there could be a significantly higher number that come back, but the service writers just tell the customer to go somewhere else because it has to be a bad head gasket. It's also possible that if a car has been overheating every day for 20 minutes on the highway for a year and the customer's been adding coolant, they just tell us "check coolant leak". I'd love some input from technicians that do both jobs and are given a clear picture of what the problem is (just coolant loss, or overheating)

On one hand, the intake gasket is pretty cheap and easy, but if I can avoid doing the head gaskets 10,000 miles later (2-3 months for me), I'd like to do the head gaskets now. But I really don't want to drill out broken exhaust manifold bolts or have the extra cost of the head gaskets and probably having the heads planed. The upside here is that I'm currently starting my own shop with a friend, and I have a fully-equipped shop that I can use whenever I want, so it's not the end of the world if I do have to do the head gaskets soon. The downside is that I'm working 2 full time physically intensive jobs until we get enough customers that I can quit the hell-hole I work at now, and I'm always tired, and never want to work on my own cars. So if I can do a 4 hour job and have it last for 6 months or more, I wont mind doing the head gaskets then because I'll almost certainly only be working at my shop. We've been growing so fast, I may not be "working for the man" more than a couple months. I just don't have the experience to fully judge for myself what I should do, and I appreciate any input.

Thanks,
Jason