Help me diagnose the cooling system issue in my brothers Escort.

My younger brother has a 1995 Ford Escort with the 1.9 engine.

Symptoms:

• At idle the temp guage gets about 1/4 away from being out of the "Normal" temp zone.
• Fan comes on but the temp never comes down with fan while idling.
• He's saying its loosing coolant (I'm going to drive and verify)
• He took it to a shop, they said it was a head gasket (not sure how they came to that conclusion)
• No white smoke from tailpipe.
• No chocolate milkshake oil.
• No drips or puddles under car while running
• If I run the motor at say 2000rpm while sitting the temp goes back down.
• Guage goes from 1/4 under halfway to 1/4 over halfway really fast when I let it idle back down.
• Noticed the radiator was pretty rusty sludgy looking from the inlet.

So I need to verify the coolant loss, and was going to do a coolant flush. I'm not sold on the the head gasket being shot, car runs fine other than the hottness. Air bubble in the system? It's got all the earmarks of a bad water pump to me, other than no coolant coming from the weep hole.

What say the hive?

Water pump impeller starting to come apart? My Golf did this about 2 years ago.

I was once getting coolant loss through a bad HG that was so light that I couldn't see the smoke (and there was no milkshake in the oil), at least not before I was stopped at night in front of a 4x4 with LED fogs on (thread here). The engine was still cooling OK as long as the system was full though, so you might have other problems on top of a bad HG.

Bad radiator, revving the motor gets the water flowing faster through the areas that aren't plugged.

Coolant loss is due to damage already done to the HG, which can be confirmed by checking the plugs to see which ones have been steam cleaned.

So the parts list now includes, water pump, radiator, coolant hoses and a head gasket set, plus machine work on the head and time for the car to be down.

Personally, I'd ditch the car and find a BP powered Escort or better.

FUUU!

Thats what I was afraid of. I'll check the plugs in a bit to confirm.

Since the head really should come off at this point, you'll want clean up the carbon/crud from between the intake and exhaust valves in the chambers and take a close look. On the CVH series of engines built up cooling system crud in the water jackets (from lack of proper cooling system maintanence) will cause localized overheating resulting in cracks running between the intake and exhaust valves seats. THAT is where the coolant loss is occurring, rather than the head gasket; system pressure spits coolant into the chamber/s on the intake stroke and its gets expelled out the exhaust valve on the exhaust stroke. Eventually the crack/s will get big enough to start wetting the plug and the cylinder will go completely dead.

Short version: It needs a re-furbished head. You can get one from Cylinder Heads International (aka Heads Only) with new seats and re-cut valves installed for about $220 shipped (you swap over the camshaft and rocker gear). The shipping box comes with a pre-paid UPS return label. rockauto.com has the Fel-Pro upper gasket set for $52.79, new head bolts for Fel-Pro head boolt set for $22.89; genuine Motorcraft t-stat for $11.57. Do the timing belt/tensioner/water pump while you're at it because it's WAAAAYYY hella easier to get at with the head off. And don't EVEN bother putting the timimg belt cover back on, that lousy two-piece infuriating berklier. That should do it. Make him help you and use it as a forced bonding experience.

Yeah These plugs look a little clean for being as worn as they look.

And like Stefan said it was probably caused by a clogged radiator, allowing the engine to overheat and cause the HG failure.

Looks like a new HG, Bolts, Waterpump, and timing belt are a little over $100, add the head shaivng to that.. I'm not going to reccomend that we fix this. If it was a 5 speed I might be interesting in keeping for a challenge car, but it's an LX auto with no power options at all, so pretty worthless.