Overheating possiblities

Hello,

I have recently acquired (or will be acquiring this weekend) a 2002 Jetta TDI. Long story short the previous owner says the car is overheating under load (up hill, under hard accel) and blowing coolant out of the degas bottle. The P.O suspected a head gasket issue and replaced the gasket however the car is doing the same thing. By stalking the P.Os post history I was able to figure out that the water pump was already replaced with one that has a metal impeller, the rad and heater core were flushed and determined to be ok, also replaced the coolant temp sensor and possibly the t-stat. They also said the fans tested good. Now I will be going back over all these areas and checking for myself, not because I don't trust the P.O but because that's just how I am. However if I am going to make an assumption I am guessing a warped head. Now the P.O did state they did not detect a warp with a straightedge when doing the head gasket. My question is, has anyone seen one of these 1.9 heads crack, or even better, has anyone seen a crack in the block?

Furthermore, does anyone have a good head they would like to part with?

Thanks for any input!

Contact Franko6 on here as he is the head specialist.
He usually has heads that he’s redone and ready to go and does exchanges .
He literally is an artist with these heads.

Here’s is email
mailto:Franko6tdi@gmail.com

Out of curiosity.....how many miles on engine?

I will definitely reach out to Frank if it comes down to that. The car has almost 380k miles. I’m trying to at least max out the odometer and hope to get to a million with it, preferably on the stock bottom end.
Of course I haven’t seen the car yet so I’m just hoping at this point.

T-stat possibly changed. Can you please clarify?

MLS head gaskets on ALHs don't fail, so chances are the engine was for whatever reason overheated... and THAT will cause some problems.

In any event, you'd need to pressure test the cooling system with the glow plugs removed to see if you can at least verify some sort of breech in the cooling system.

T-stat possibly changed. Can you please clarify?

Click to expand...

sorry while I was typing this I could not remember if they said they replaced the t-stat or not, but I'm pretty sure they did. Obviously I'm going to verify this.

oilhammer said:

MLS head gaskets on ALHs don't fail, so chances are the engine was for whatever reason overheated... and THAT will cause some problems.
In any event, you'd need to pressure test the cooling system with the glow plugs removed to see if you can at least verify some sort of breech in the cooling system.

Click to expand...

understood, I was more or less trying to see how likely it is for these heads and/or block to crack. A search found no definitive results.