Overheating Smoking Car or Truck Engine Always Use Antifreeze See Why

This is our 2006 Ford Explorer. Our vehicle is equipped with a 4.6 liter, V8 engine. Now, for this vehicle, despite the great condition that the rest of our truck is in, we've had a major engine failure. This failure was head gaskets. What that means is our coolant and our oil are now mixing together because the jackets and galleys aren't probably separated by the head gasket. Some other failures that could result from this are getting coolant or oil into the engine's combustion chamber as your head gasket is the final seal between the cylinder head and the engine block, keeping that combustion chamber separated and sealed.

The way we figured this out on our truck is it started smoking, it was really difficult to start. We took the throttle body off for another procedure and actually found about a half a quart of water inside of our intake manifold. I started digging deeper into it. We checked our dip stick and found a chocolate milk like substance on it which is obviously not what we had put in there originally. We filled our engine with regular motor oil. Our cooling system had no fluid left in it and when I finally pulled the drain plug, you can see in this clip, we drained a little more than a gallon of water out of our engine.

Over a certain amount of time, your coolant does break down just like your oil does. Over time, those additives go away and stop being as effective as they once were so you need to put fresh stuff in. It's critical that you mix your coolant 50/50 with distilled water. When we got our vehicle, it came from the South with a warmer climate. The vehicle was running on just water because they didn't need to worry about it freezing in the winter. We brought it up here into the snow belt. The water froze, cracked our engine block, blew out freeze plugs and after all this, come to find out, we also had head gasket issues with it. So, what was once a great, good looking, good running vehicle, has now come to a point where I need to put an engine in it for it to be back in shape. Maintaining your cooling system is inexpensive, easy and a great way to insure that your engine last as long as your vehicle.

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