Hello all, I am fairly new to the site- I posted in the "new member" forum above but have not recveived any answers or suggestions so I thought I might post a new thread about it.

Here is what I posted above:

Hello, I am a new member here and have just purchased a 2003 Maxima GLE with approx. 172k miles. I welcome the opportunity to interact with fellow Maxima owners and share info about these great cars!
I have owned two other Maximas and both gave me very good reliability and were a pleasure to drive.
Unfortunately the one I just purchased I do not think I was so lucky. I paid $800 for it because the girl selling it said that it had a bad oil leak and an exhaust leak, it was missing on a couple of cylinders and the cat needed replacing. I figured well for $800 that does not sound so bad.
Well after going through all of that I finally got it up and running the other day only to find out I believe it *gulp* has a blown head gasket. I do not know this for absolute certain yet-- it is at the mechanics waiting to be diagnosed. But all the signs point to it- overheating when driving and losing coolant. I do not see any obvious leaks so not sure what else it could be.
Anyway my question is: if this indeed turns out to be the case, it would be beyond my skill to repair so is it worth the cost to have this done at the shop or should I just scrap the car? I have approx $1100 into it right now including the $800 purchase price. Any advice or suggestions would be welcome. Thanks!

 

You may be better off with a used engine and installing it. I have swapped engines with a friend. It took us 2 days, fixing anything needing attention along the way. Probably 20 hrs total. Expect $300-400 for the engine.

It's a can of worms either way. You'll have plenty of regular maintenance items to fix no matter which route you take.

Hopefully someone will chime in about head gasket labor.

 

Thanks for your response!
As far as the regular maintenance items go, incredibly absolutely everything works on this car, and even more surprising there are NO suspension issues (something I had to fix on both of my other Maximas.) It even still has the original Nissan struts on it but rides great. That's one reason why it's going to be a hard decision if it comes down to a blown head gasket.

 

Cheaper and easier to just swap another motor in. Kills me to say it because it is fixable and its just adding to wastefulness, but at the end of the day theres basically an endless supply of fwd 3.5 motors, nissan put them in practically everything. You should have little issue finding one with significantly lower miles for ~500 bucks. Installation is pretty straight forward, depending on your level of mechanical experience, nothing hard about pulling the motors on these cars.

 

I know who you are.