Hi again all.

So on a long journey from darn sarf to visit the mother in sunny Scarborough we ran in to a spot of bother.

Had that terrible sudden jump of engine temp. Pulled over to check a few things. Engine was rattling like crazy and sounded rough as hell. Smell of petrol in the coolant, oil on the bottom of the plug on cylinder 4, so called AA guy who more or less confirmed by worst fear, he ran an OBD diag and sure enough, engine misfire error code and cyl4 misfire code. He checked compresison to cyl's 3 and 4 and that seemed not too bad but it looks like blown head gasket with cyl4 firing into the coolant system.

So guys can anyone help by answering me....
How much can I expect pay to get this fixed at a garage?
How long should it take because I need the car back asap to get back home?
Are there any knock on effects that I should look out for after having a head gasket replaced and could this be the beginning of the end for this engine?

Any advice would be most appreciated.

Cheers

Andy

Thanks for the advice mate.

Stuck it in a garage now and everything is pretty much as you said. Been quoted £500-£550 for the whole job.
But they say that apparently skimming the head on a Stilo os tricky business and can cause all kinds of problems.
Are they just trying to ge tout of doing a proper job or is there any weight to what they saying?

Cheers

Hi All.

So I got the head gasket replaced. Garage said the head was still level so no need to skim.
Still having problems tho.

The engine is running very poor on idle. Instead of a nice steady turn over the engine is 'breathing' up and down. Never quite cuts out but revs drop very low and then jump back to 800-1000 rpm. Sometimes it sits idling at just over 1000 rpm which is too high. Rev counter needle twitches. You can also feel the engine vibration thru the whole car when the revs drop low.

I've had a similar problem with another car that turned out to be the O2 (Lambda) sensor.

Just wondering if anyone had any ideas what this might be???

Andy

Hi guys.

Following up on your advice to check the ICV to solve the rough idle it looks like the garage I used has damaged a couple of parts of my engine.

Check out the ringed sections on the attached pics.

On the pic that shows the ICV close up you can see where an ancillary pipe that leads off the main inlet pipe has been broken at the point where it joins the larger pipe just before the ICV. It looks like they've tried to glue it back in with superglue or something. But now that glue has give up and the pipe is no longer sealed.

Anything i can do to seal it myself or would it be best just to replace the whole pipe?

Also, on the same pic, the ringed section to the left of the one highlighting the broken pipe shows an engine part where it looks on close inspection like something should have been bolted on but the bolt has been sheared off. I've no idea what this would be for so any advice on that would be greatly appreciated.

Also attached is a larger pic of the engine head showing the connectors for the sparks. Please take a look and tell me if there is anything that looks out of place.

I'm worried now that after spending £700+ getting the head gasket fixed there is now still a lot more work to do.

BTW I cleaned the ICV as best I could and it made no difference to the rough idling. It's still dropping the revs really low and cutting out from time to time.

Help me guys?!?!?!?! What should I do next?

Cheers

Andy