Fixing a head gasket
We use a liquid fix on a 2002 Skoda Fabia.
Online, a fierce battle rages over the efficacy of head gasket sealants. A multitude of motorists claims to have saved countless fortunes on repair bills while prolonging the lives of their cherished cars by decades. Against them stand the sceptics, to whom all chemical sealants are snake oil. Faced with a blown head gasket, Roger Wilkinson chose to dig deeper.
Firstly, this mess was all down to my own meanness and disorganisation. The clutch on my reliable 2002 Skoda Fabia warhorse failed in early March 2020. In those halcyon, pre-covid days, I had a tough call – the repair cost was roughly equal to the value of the car.
Being averse to change, I gambled on there being a few more years left in the old girl, so chose to pay-up and have the job done. ‘Better the devil you know,’ went through my head, as it would that of many who like dirt-cheap mobility. With the inevitable extras, including a CV joint, the bill came to £600. As I drove away, Mick, of the eponymous five-star rated railway arch garage in South-east London, advised me I’d soon need a new water pump, mate.
No doubt said pump did rattle a bit, but all was well for three months. Back then, in the misery of full lockdown, no one was driving much anyhow.
In flaming June, when life seemed to be easing back to normal, the dashboard temperature warning light would come on from time-to-time. So I would top-up the expansion tank with half a kettle of water and think no more.
It might have stayed that way for many months more, pootling around South London doing a dozen miles a day. But it so happened I had to deliver some electric bikes to my son in Ireland, which meant a 300-mile hike up to Holyhead. So I packed plenty top-up water.
The car seemed on top form until Oswestry when the temperature light came on. But this time, two pints weren’t enough to put it out. And the scene in the expansion tank was frenetic, to say the least.
Ten minutes later, at the next fuel station, another half-gallon of water went in, but 400 yards down the road, it was the same story. In went my last water bottle and I limped off to a lay-by on the A5.
Night was falling with Holyhead almost two hours away. I called the AA and resigned myself to having no chance of catching the 1.30am ferry.
The rescue truck arrived at 1.20am and we reached the port by 3.30am. After miserable and futile attempts to sleep, Skoda and I limped onto the 8.30am boat and off again in Dublin, and once more, thanks to AA Ireland, was towed to a garage near my destination in Dun Laoghaire, eight miles south of the capital.
At this point, my only local knowledge came from Google Reviews, which is how I met Lukasz Samol, boss of Tramway Motors, who assured me he could fix it. This was a Wednesday afternoon. It was Sunday before Lukasz called me to collect. The bill (€370) was more than twice his initial estimate to replace the water pump. Then the bombshell. He said: “It’s not good news. I think you’ve blown your head gasket. When you get off the ferry, I advise you to go straight to the first garage that’s open.”
I said I couldn’t possibly afford a head gasket job – either side of the Irish Sea – and that unless there was another solution, a perfectly good, rust-free reliable car with a barely run-in 1500mile clutch would have to be scrapped. I needed time to think and decided to fly home and deal with the problem later.
I figured that if I’d trashed my head gasket, it was worth the relatively modest cost of a sealant before having either to scrap the car or trying to sell it as a cheap ‘fixer’ with the benefit of a near-new clutch and virgin water pump.
Doing my homework
I learned a few things; first that opinion was bitterly divided over whether sealants were any good; and second that though their chemistry is similar, not all sealants are equal – a few brands stood out. So I invited one such – Steel Seal – to help me carry-out a live test.
It was quite a face-off; one that would see professional mechanics going head-to-head with the company that says its product delivers guaranteed results, or your money back. Both could not be right…
For team motor mechanics, Lukasz said he’d tried Steel Seal on another car a few years ago with no success. He said: “In an overheating engine, the back pressure is too much for any liquid to plug a ruptured gasket for any length of time.”
For a second opinion, I took the Fabia a few hundred yards further down the road to a garage, where mechanic Roy Byrne poked and prodded, watched the cooling system boil better than Etna, and declared: “Sealants don’t work, full stop.” And pronounced the Skoda fit only for scrap.
Meanwhile, over at Steel Seal’s HQ Stratford-on-avon, Tom Gibbons, head of the sales team, asked me: “Does the car start?” – it does, first time, too,
I told him. Then he asked: “Does the engine tickover” “Yes”, I said, “but it’s a bit rough; like it’s on three cylinders.”
“Then,” he said, “there’s no reason why Steel Seal shouldn’t work.”
Steel Seal is bullish about its efficacy – guaranteed to work or your money back, it boasts – if you tell them the treatment didn’t work, they used to ask for evidence that the vehicle had been scrapped. These days, word of a professional mechanic is enough for them to honour that promise.
That said, Tom adds realistically, it can’t fix all blown head gaskets.
He says: “Steel Seal works almost every time when the gasket has just started to fail and the compromised areas are small. It’s less effective where there is major damage.
“Sometimes Steel Seal will partially fix a blown gasket and in those cases we will offer a second treatment free of charge,” he adds.
“But if the problem goes beyond the gasket, there’s no point in trying a second treatment.”
So I make a return trip to South Dublin to compere the contest. The bill for a bottle over the counter at the local motor factors was a €54 – a shade under £50. Then it was off to Lukasz’s workshop.
At this point, neither Lukasz nor I know the extent of that damage. On the plus side, no white smoke was coming from the exhaust and there was no obvious evidence of coolant contaminating the oil, both tell-tale signs of head gasket failure. Against that, the engine was misfiring and probably running on three cylinders.
But the fact remained that without a working cooling system, the Skoda was going nowhere. So the first step was to recap the problem. We fired-up the engine. The horror show of a few weeks earlier on the A5 swiftly repeated itself. Within 20 seconds or so, the dashboard temperature warning light came on, soon followed by a fearful riot in the expansion tank. The prospects did not look good. The new water pump was whirring away, bathing the head in coolant, but combustion gases boiled it up almost immediately.
It was time to start the sealant test…
To be as objective as possible, we followed Steel Seal’s instructions to the very last letter and were overseen at each stage by Tom and his team in the UK.
A Steel Seal treatment is, ideally, a twoday job. For the best results, there must be no trace of coolant or anti-freeze in the system. So Lukasz drained the system dry.
As directed, he filled up with tap water then ran the engine for 15 minutes with heater and fan full on. He then let it cool for a full three hours before draining the system prior to administering the sealant.
The full bottle – about 45cl – was poured in and the system topped-up again with water. The engine was then restarted. Again, within a minute, the warning light came on. A few minutes later, with the engine at normal operating temperature, a rave was getting under way in the cooling system. For an hour, the engine was allowed to tickover and was observed throughout.
Ten – 20, 30, 40 minutes on and little or no visible improvement was seen. The liquid bubbled away in the expansion tank. It’s probably subjective, however, but I felt there was less of the distinctive acrid smell of an overheating engine during this phase of the treatment.
According to Steel Seal, letting an engine tickover for a full hour has the effect of driving the product through every inch of the network of ducts and channels in the cylinder-head, seeking-out any compromised areas. Particles adhere in these areas and gradually solidify in the minutes and hours after the engine is switched-off and the curing process begins.
So that was it. It just remained to switch-off, head home and return to see what awaited the next day.
Next morning, we regather and
Lukasz starts the Skoda engine – first time as ever – and we keenly observe the expansion tank. After one, two, three, even ten minutes there was no temperature warning light. So far, so good. So we let the motor tickover for almost half-an-hour more – the cooling system behaved perfectly.
The transformation from the previous day was simply astonishing. Everything was working normally and you could stick a bare finger into the expansion tank and not risk being scalded.
Indeed, had we had four firing cylinders – we could have declared the treatment a total success, but we didn’t and it was time to dig deeper…
Out came the spark plugs: in cylinders 2, 3 and 4 the threads were clean and the central electrode a reassuring sandy hue. But in cylinder 1, it was black. A compression test confirmed respectable
values (12 and 10.5) on Nos. 4 and 3 cylinders, a sub-standard 6 on No.2 and almost nothing on cylinder 1. This was no longer just a cylinder-head case, but something more serious.
All very sad, but enough to convince me that had I aborted my journey in Oswestry, as soon as I’d I lost four pints of water in less than a mile in fact, all this could have been avoided.
But none of that takes away from the clear fact that, despite whatever damage overheating had wreaked lower down than the head gasket, Steal Seal achieved a completely successful restoration of the Skoda’s cooling system.
Lukasz agreed, saying: “I was very impressed by the way Steel Seal appeared to completely rectify the cooling system. It was working exactly as it should, but if we were to remove the cylinder-head, all would be revealed – most probably damage to the piston rings.
“But I would now be happy to try sealant treatment on a car with a similar cooling or head gasket-related problem if the car was of relatively low value, but on a newer or lower-mileage car with the same problem, I would still recommend replacing the gasket after skimming the head.”
The upshot was the car’s days were over. The Dublin Fire Brigade agreed to take it as an aid to staff rescue training. Someone still carries a torch for my old Skoda...