Inevitable LIM Gasket replacement

[gooberbob]

I have a 2001 van with over 260K miles on it (mostly highway, obviously). The thing is in great shape; paint, body, interior, exhaust, engine accessories, trans, tires, A/C, and all the power goodies. There are four issues which I consider minor and intend to fix. The Park-Aid is inop, the fuel gage is inop, it uses about a quart of oil every 1500 miles, and the LIM gasket just started leaking externally. It has been weeping for a while now, but now it's bad enough that I have to do something about it. This is our around town daily driver, never goes more than 50 miles from home any more. My wife and I have owned this car from new and have never had to do anything with it except replace wear items. We want to keep it if it's practical. My range of options run from replacing the LIM gasket only and buttoning it up and hope for the best to a complete engine change. I am leaning toward the minimum. I would like some feedback on what some of you experts would do if this was your car. For example, as a minimum, should I also pull the heads? If so, as long as it's torn down, should I do the timing set, have heads rebuilt, replace the cam bearings, etc? I haven't checked the compression lately, but I think most of the oil consumption is leaks around the valve guides and external.

[Milo2001]

If you have worked on engines before, with a good manual, you should be able to accomplish all that you want. The cam bearing need to be done with the engine out of the car. With everything else you also want to do, at 260K miles you've got your money's worth out of it. If it were me, a new engine or new van would be ordered. Just doing the LIM gasket would probably buy you some more time. The gaskets i believe are about $300 complete, with a head rebuild of a coupl of hundred dollars. This would be a lot of work. You may want to consider just doing the LIM gasket and buy a case of oil for the leaking guides and just run the thing into the ground.

Good luck.

[gooberbob]

Thnks Milo. I am in the process of sealing it up. I am cleaning the cooling system with some "flush while you drive" solution. After that I am going to try some Bars Leaks. If that doesn't work, then I'll do the LIM gasket. I haven't had any overheating problems, but my coolant sure looked bad, like toilet water. Don't know if that is oil in the coolant or something I added to stop the leak years ago.