Jeffsjlps

Hello everyone, my 2006 maxima 3.5 has a little oil in the coolant, I opened the reservoir cap and noticed a cream of oil, what should I do? Change engine or repair?

TDGrant

Check your transmission fluid. The radiator has a transmission cooler component built in it and those are known to fail as they age, which ends up with cooling system and transmission exchanging fluids.

Jeffsjlps

i will check this but my car only has 114k miles. hard to think the head is blown

TDGrant

Jeffsjlps

The car appears to have a milky oil cap, and also a milky oil cap on the coolant reservoir.

TDGrant

Okay, that narrows down. Hard to say what the next move should be. Really, as to repair or replace, it comes down to cost and availability of another engine. That said, something needs to be done since running the engine with the oil mixing with coolant is certainly gonna wreck your engine.

Diagnostic fee + repair = X
Find, and cost of, replacement engine + installation fee = Y

If you have a blown head gasket, then I would just move on to trying to find a replacement engine. If it is blown head gasket, you might discover that the head(s) need to be resurfaced or worse that the heads cannot be resurfaced.

That all said, lots of people on this forum have dealt with what you are dealing with. Give it a few days so they can give you some advice.

TDGrant

Here is a good overview of the process of trying to salvage the engine. It should give you a good idea when costing the repair, or the replacement, of the engine.