OOk this is a long one. A few months ago I decided to buy a 1990 v6 maxima with oil in the coolant.. I think it has a vg30e engine. I asked around and people said maybe a head gasket. So I having never done any thing more complex than spark plugs and an oil change bought a repair manual and a head gasket kit. I didn't even know what a head was (or that there was two of them) when I started. The car is back together now and I am having some problems.

I suspect that the head gasket may not have been the culprit and that perhaps it is a cracked head/block.

The oil is milky colored and there is a 1/4 layer of white gunk the consistency of snot around the oil fill hole. During the gasket removal process I stupidly sprayed ALOT of gasket remover all over the rocker arms and other parts of the INSDIDE of the engine.. I know I know pretyt lame. Any way I have changed the oil once and it is still milky colored. Is it posible that I simply have alot of gasket remover in there and perhaps a couple more oil changes will clear it up or should one oil change have fixed this? I'm concerned that coolant may be leaking into the oil. The thing is before I started all this the oil had no coolant in it but the coolant had oil.

The coolant still has crud in it however again I can not tell if this is left over from before or not. All of the coolant hoses etc. had 1/4" to 1/2" of grey goo in them when I put it back together and I have flushed gobs of it every time I did a coolant flush (did like 5)

My most pressing concern at the moment however is that it does not run well at all. After turning the engine on I can rev it normaly. After running for 30 seconds to a minute I can barely get it over idling speed. If I floor it it will NOT rev at all however if I slowly press the gas pedle it will carefully crawl up. This is all happening in neutral.

This sounds like a posible fuel problem to me. My little repair manual tells me about a eccs control unit that has diagnostic lights on it that I can use to find out if there si a fuel problem. Howeever the freaking book does nto tell me where the heck this thing is!

One other posible explanation is a vacum hose mix up. I labeled all my hoses however a couple labels fell off and I wonder about one hose. If you are in front of the vehicle there is a place for a vacum line on the back of the intake manifold cover to your left. I have this plugged into a device atached to the firewall. The device has two plugs I am plugging it into the plug closest to the firewall..

As you can tell I'm pretty new to this car thing =) It's been fun though.. I just hope it does not have a cracked block or head as I'm not about to fix that ha!

thanks for the great website =)

 

step #1. go to the parts store and buy a compression tester. do a compression test on all the cylinders and it'll be a good start to telling you where the problems are.