I think my headgasket is blown.

Here I my symptoms:

-a significant amount of white smoke on startup
-continous stream of bubbles in the coolant overflow container
-I have to add coolant every couple days with increasing frequency, today I had to pull over twice within 20km to add coolant
-I thought it might be the EGR cooler leaking so I bypassed the coolant lines from the egr cooler (my rocketchip has almost elminated EGR). But the bubbles kept coming
-if I rev it up a bit the bubbles get way worse

What I can do to make sure it is my headgasket?

Yeah that sounds like the headgasket.

How many miles?

SuperJ said:

What I can do to make sure it is my headgasket?

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Compression test is probably the quickest diagnostic.

I've got almost exactly 100,000miles.

I'm blaming the failure on my previous Technine tune if it is my headgasket. With that tune I had some pretty bad spikes before I got my boostvalve in. With my RC tune I don't need my boost valve, the most I see is about 21psi spikes with no boost valve.

I'll look into getting it tested this week. Any idea how many shop hours a headgasket will be? Trying to figure out if I'm looking at $300 or $1500?

Before you change the head gasket, don't rule out the EGR cooler. On the early A5s there was a recall because the EGR cooler would leak coolant. Might be the problem you are having.

Head gasket

Definitely blown headgasket. If you have not had your tioming belt & watyer pump replaced get it done also. Job will probably run you close to $2000 at dealer!

Ol'Rattler said:

Before you change the head gasket, don't rule out the EGR cooler. On the early A5s there was a recall because the EGR cooler would leak coolant. Might be the problem you are having.

Click to expand...

I bypassed the coolant lines around the EGR cooler to rule it out.
My EGR cooler was replaced under warranty about 40,000miles ago.

2004STARWARSTDI said:

Definitely blow headgasket. If you have not had your tioming belt & watyer pump replaced get it done also. Job will probably run you close to $2000 at dealer!

Click to expand...

That the frustrating thing. I just paid in the last month to have my timing belt/water pump done, as well as my cam, lifters etc, and my clutch (DMF was shot). It would have been nice to combine the headgasket job with the cam and timing belt.

One more test I'm going to do is monitor coolant pressure versus accelerator. If the pressure spikes suddenly under load, that should indicate a headgasket. I have no doubt this will happen because the coolant bubbles increase their intensity just reving it to 2000rpm in neutral. The only thing puzzling to me is that I have no black residue or gunk in my coolant so far.