Sean - Aren't those pressures a bit high?
I'd expect to see oil pressure at 70psi and coolant at 14/15psi?
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David,
Depends on what you're marque is. VW Group products tend to produce the figures I showed.
Also diesels tend to be higher due to very high combustion pressures necessitating extra oil pressures.
The point really was the ratio of oil pressure to water pressure.
Often, when a head gasket goes, you see steam from the exhaust as the gasket has failed badly and is sucking water in to the cylinder on the induction phase.
To see black oil in the water suggests more like a major leak, possibly a crack from the oil system through to the cooling sys. Something will have happened here. Stress or trauma to the engine to fracture something.
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Phil,
The oil cooler is at the base of the oil filter on the front of your engine, you'll be able to see the two coolant hoses leading to/from it.
The oil is cooled by the coolant circulating round the unit.
To test it drain down the coolant when cold and join the two coolant pipes togetgher with a bit of plain tube. Re-fill the cooling syatem, bleed and then run the engine with the two stubs on the oil cooler not connected to anything. If David and I are right you'll see oil pour out of the pipe stubs.
With the evidence you've given us this is the most likely problem...and yes I've known just this failure before...that's why I thought of it straight away.
Oh and this diesel has a slightly lower min oil pressure than some of its petrol brothers. The non-turbo diesel runs a far lower oil pressure than the petrols.
Good luck.
M.M
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MM
It sounds like you're some kind of Xantia specialist?
I may need to come to you for advice in the future!
By the way my £60 Xantia now has a new engine in it and is running fine. In all the car will have probably cost me about £700 including fresh MOT (It's a 97 P reg 1.8 16v LX with air con).
H
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>It sounds like you're some kind of Xantia specialist?
Yes sort of...
Despite not getting here so much these days I did notice you'd picked up an engine and seemed to be happily getting on with it.
If you have a need for any other used parts I've a contact who is an enthusiast (not dealer/breaker) who is dismantling two TDs.
M.M
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I bow to your superior knowledge here MM....
I have not heard about failed XUD oil coolers in the past, but will store it away for future problem diagnosis. Mind you, I bet getting the oil cooler off on an Air con car is tricky....
RichardW
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>>I bow to your superior knowledge here MM....
No need to do that Richard!
Having seen it before and known that black oil is not usual for head gaskets I thought it worth checking before fearing the head would need to come off.
M.M
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Good luck.
Alas and alack, I've done the test as described (its quite fiddly releasing the coolant pipe clips isn't it) but the oil cooler is intact. No oil emerged from the pump through the coolant stubs when I ran the engine (Though it IS full of oil just like the rest of the cooling system). Ominously, water has now appeared as droplets on the dipstick and condensate inside the oil filler cap (never seen before, and this was noticed before I ran the engine for the test).
Thanks very much for the suggestion though, it was definitely worth a try and would have been a much cheaper and easier option. It now looks as though it must be major blow between the oilway and water channels in the head gasket or a crack in the head (I hope not the latter). I'm told a new head costs £400 for the bit. I dread to think what the cost will be if its the block! Is there any RELIABLE alternative to a NEW head if it is cracked? Incidentally, I'll be paying a friendly experienced mechanic to do the job. I've done many a cylinder head in my time but I draw the line at a car manufacturer who expects you to have special citroen tools grafted surgically onto your fingertips to reach anything.
Thanks again
Philippio
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Phil,
I'll leave the diagnostics to M.M 'cos he really is the expert, but I will say that I'm surprised the fault isn't exactly as he described. I just thought I'd answer your question about a reliable alternative to a new head (in the unlikely event that yours is cracked).
There's a lot of nonsense written about cracked cylinder heads (and blocks). The advice so often given, in Haynes manuals and elsewhere, that a new or exchange head is necessary is quite wrong.
Welding is not a good option as it is tricky, will probably distort the head and usually calls for subsequent machining. However, a process known as cold stitching can produce a repair cheaper than welding, often stronger than the original, with no distortion and usually no subsequent machining. Even if the crack is in a difficult place, like under a valve seat insert, cold stitching can be done (probably without removing the insert!).
There are several firms specialising in cold stitching. One which deals almost exclusively in engine repairs is Surelock, located in Oakham, Rutland. The firm I worked for had work done there, as has a friend who is railway diesel engine specialist. All reports have been very favourable. Their website is www.castingrepairs.com.
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Phil,
What a shame, I'd hoped the cooler would be u/s and make you a simple(ish) and cheap(ish) repair.
What is a little odd for a "normal" head gasket failure is it going from no fault to loads of black oil all of a sudden....so you might just be looking at an unusual failure.
Personally I'd be likely fit a quality exchange head to your car from a national supplier Dizzy and I know well. They are about £550 plus carriage (to a retail customer) for a rebuilt head complete with camshaft, valves etc.
Dizzy is right a one-off repair from a specialist can often give a good result but time may be against them. You have to get your own head sent to them for an opinion/quote and then they may well need to have it a week before completing/returning. It is sometimes a good option for the cost concious DIYer though.
M.M
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Just a thought - has the Xantia got liners? Might be liner seal gone?
Graeme
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No liners - it's a cast iron block.
RichardW
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Personally I'd be likely fit a quality exchange head to your car from a national supplier Dizzy and I know well. They are about £550 plus carriage (to a retail customer) for a rebuilt head complete with camshaft, valves etc. Dizzy is right, a one-off repair from a specialist can often give a good result but time may be against them. You have to get your own head sent to them for an opinion/quote and then they may well need to have it a week before completing/returning. It is sometimes a good option for the cost concious DIYer though.
M.M, You make a fair point, however ...
An exchange head will not be new. It will have been handed in for exchange because it had a major fault and this means that it will have had extensive repair, perhaps including cold-stitching or welding. It will probably also have had machining of the gasket face(s) and this will alter the engine geometry to a lesser or greater extent, in some cases requiring a special, thicker, head gasket.
You will have to wait for this exchange head to arrive and then you will need to send yours off for inspection and hope for a refund of the surcharge - which you might not receive if it is cracked!
A cylinder head crack is often very localised and it seems a pity to hand in an otherwise good head in exchange for one having an unknown history. For a head that is cracked but otherwise in good condition, I still think cold-stitching at around £250 should be considered as an option to an exchange at around £550 (+ possibly non-returnable surcharge) even if this means a few days delay. Describing the fault over the phone to Surelock should be enough to be given a fair estimate of cost and time.
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Thanks to everyone for all the help so far. I proved it wasn't the oil cooler by running the engine with the water pipes disconnected from the o/c and joined together, whilst looking for oil emerging from the stubs. Nothing emerged, but once the engine was warm enough, oil still erupted from the coolant header tank like Vesuvius!
So the head is now off but we've hit a snag. One of the injectors stripped its thread (from the head) as it was being removed. The firm who have pressure tested the head (and found it was NOT cracked) say that this particular thread is not repairable and the head is therefore scrap anyway. Have you come across this and do you know of any specialist repair firms who repair injector threads in turbodiesel heads? I live in Wirral incidentally but am prepared to travel.
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Phil,
What an absolute pain. Threads stripping when removing something are not unknown but unusual enough to be real bad luck.
I know engineering firms such as Dizzy mentions for the cold-stitching of a crack can repair almost anything but it all depends on the time and trouble you want to go to in keeping your own head.
More importantly have you seen any evidence of the failure to cause this sudden oil in coolant problem? If you haven't is your plan to assemble it with a new gasket and hope for the best??
Have the people checking your head passed it as OK for warping? There is a very small margin for machining these head faces without complications arising.
M.M
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Thanks MM
The gasket was a bit of a mess on removal apparently (I'm not doing the job myself) though I understand much of this is due to the process of removal and it was difficult to be sure if this was the cause if the leak.
The head has been pressure tested but I haven't asked about checks for warping so I'll do that.
I've talked to a very helpful ex-Citroen service manager who says that problems further down in this type of engine are very rare (though in my case rare seems to be the norm) and in his experience have taken the form of block porosity rather than major leaks.
Currently the plan is to repair and refit the head (if the thread can be repaired) and "hope for the best" or source an alternative second hand or reconditioned head and do the same. A new head is £500 and I don't want to splash out so much if it isn't the cause of the problem!
My main alternative is to try and locate a replacement engine second hand. The car isn't worth a new one! Any ideas as to where I could go to find one?
Many thanks again.
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Phil,
I'm very wary of used engines unless they are still running and in a vehicle with known history....diesels in particular are a real lottery.
It should be possible to find one though because, for example, I've bought a MOTd Citroen with the engine you seek for as litte as £400 because of a clutch fault. The engine was mint at a little over 100K, one sensible owner and full Citroen/specialist history.
I've enabled my profile for you to mail me as I do know an enthusiast who is breaking a couple and might help.
M.M
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Hi MM
Sorry I didn't get onto you direct when your profile was opened. We decided to go for the new head and it has proved to be the correct decision as it has stopped the oil leak. The replacement engine was therefore not needed. However, the lads that did the job steam cleaned the cooling system out to get rid of the oil and unwittingly blew the heater matrix. I now have a passenger footwell full of coolant. As a temporary stopgap I'm tempted to disconnect the matrix at the cylinder head end and join the two stubs with a u-bend of hose so that the car will still run. Any problems with this?
I've heard that replacing the matrix is a pig of a job - and I'll have to do it myself as I can't afford any more labour charges! Any useful hints and wrinkles would be very welcome. Many many thanks for all the help so far.
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Phil,
Good that the head sorted the oil...Bad luck on the matrix. If I'd done that to your car I'd be working an extra weekend to do it for you FOC...or wan't yours a normal paid job??
No time to tell about the matrix, bit later if someone hasn't already filled you with doom about the procedure!
M.M
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Thanks to everyone so far. I've probably been a bit harsh on the steam cleaning lads. As it turns out the matrix itself didn't get steamed, only the block and main hoses, and there was a pre-existing leak in the matrix (which I had previously sealed with Radweld)that has presumably now opened up bigger (and now doesn't respond to Radweld). The leak appeared the day after the return to daily service.
What I want to do in the short term is to isolate the matrix so that the coolant can't escape and I can run the car. I was thinking of removing the plastic double hose connector from the end of the matrix (on the engine side of the bulkhead) and connecting the two plastic stub pipes together with a u-shaped length of hose. How do I remove the connector from the matrix? The Haynes manual says to push the metal retaining clip to one side and "pull the connector assembly away from the matrix". It won't budge no matter how hard I pull! Am I missing something?
Also, how essential is it that a flow is maintained through these pipes? Will it do any harm if I simply clamp them off?
Many many thanks for the all the help.
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Phil,
Fair enough if it was "Radwelded" before. Personal thing but I would be far happier to see these hoses pulled off and a proper loop of pipe joining them.
The procedure you describe is correct, it's just that they are so tight you need a huge pull to get them off...so much so that you think they'll break first....and you'll take the skin from your hands when they do free!
There is an easier way though. The hoses and that twin plastic elbow look one moulded section...not quite.
If you look you'll see that the twin rubber hoses come onto the plastic stubs and then have a joined plastic collar arrangement over them.
The collars act like permanent jubilee clips. So what I do when the need arises is to carefully hacksaw through the outer plastic collars without damaging the hoses. Pull it all away and the rubber hoses will come on and off the stubs as any normal coolant pipe join. Jubilee clips can be used for the joins when you finally replace them.
Very very busy but some matrix replacement stuff later!
M.M
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My goodness, Phil, you've got some stamina. Lesser mortals would have scrapped the car and spent the rest of their naturals moaning about dodgy French cars.
As MM implies, I would ask the steam cleaner lads to take some responsibility for blowing the matrix apart.
I have heard it said that some oil in the cooling system is nothing to worry about but this was years ago from a chap who swore that a tablespoon of 20w/50 in the radiator of his Jowett Javelin every summer stopped the water pump squeaking.
H.
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Stranger in a strange land
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Hawkeye
Not so daft - many years back I cured a squeaky water pump with a spoonful of soluble cutting oil in the rad! I was by no means the first to do so.
Regards
john S
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Phil,
Really stuck for time to reply to you much more, and not going to get on here again for a week or so.
Anyway bear in mind this is a huge task that the trade hate doing, it is booked at about 8hrs but often takes two men most of the day.... or perhaps the best part of a day and a half for one chap.
Have a look at Haynes, they describe it pretty well.
This is a once in a lifetime job for a Xantia, getting it wrong can result in annoying electrical problems and loads of rattles/squeaks around the facia for the rest of the car's time.
Overall my tip would be to be very precise and methodical. As you follow the procedure write every single *actual* step you take down on a lined pad, however small a detail. This is invaluable on assembly as you can follow it in reverse to stop some daft mistakes.
Hang descriptive tags from every cable/plug/socket as you remove them. You might think you'll easily remember, you might not!
You will find things (like you found with the matrix hose connector) that seem hard to separate...sometimes this will be a fixing you've forgotten, others just the thing needing a confident yank apart.
Keep all screws/fixings tidy in pots and then you might have half a chance of getting them all back with not too many left over!!
Lastly try and look at the job as a series of smaller sections, crashing headlong into this with elbows flying is sure to lead to disaster.
Good luck.
M.M
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Just a quick thought. If you're planning to dismantle a dash it's handy to have a camera available (preferably digital) and take loads of pics at every opportunity. Label everything too. I've even photocopied a Haynes manual on occasions and stroked off each step as I've done it - just for the sake of being methodical. These things are usually easier to dismantle than to put back so you adopt a joie de vivre on the way in and deceive yourself into thinking you'll remember how everything fitted originally.
Dashboards are usually made up as complete units in the factory then offered up to the car in one go (front subframes are often the same) So the manufacturers neither know nor care what it's like to do it 'after the event'.
Another thought - have a good look at the notorious plastic clip at the top of the clutch pedal on the Xantia while you're in there. If it breaks (and it does!) it is a devil of a job to do with the dash in place!
Graeme
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Thanks for the advice. The camera idea is a great one. As for the plastic clip I've already been caught by that one and spent three days on my back with the drivers seat removed and my head jammed against a torch so I'll not forget that one in a hurry. I already have a new clip as a spare.
Regards
Phil W
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Thanks so much for your wisdom MM. I can be methodical (an analytical scientist by trade) so I'll apply your suggestions if I decide to go ahead with it. Thanks also for your insight into the hose connections. I'll do the by-pass at the weekend. In the meantime, if you're going on holiday, Have a great time!
Regards
Phil W
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Hi all, re. oil in rad.....xantia or in my case '95 peugeot 405 1.9 td. I've got similar problems and in desperation keyed in 'oil in rad' on the net and it came up with your site!
To start with there was not too much oil but it was not 'yogurty', the rad wasn't pressurising , no overheating and the heater was still working.This didn't feel like a head gasket to me so I thought of the oil cooler and have taken a chance on a s/hand one. I managed to fit it, I've pushed gallons of soapy water through the rad. and after chucking in 2 radflushes I'm running it around locally hoping it will wash through.I'm expecting to have to drain and fill it 2 or 3 times and all I can do is keep my fingers crossed. As I expect you know these motors are prone to air locks and this is now affecting the heater and worryingly the temp.gauge doesn't work. It's a bit dodgy but I don't see the point of trying to sort this out until I've got the oil out.
I'll give it a few days and let you know. Graham
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