Well it appears my new thing is fixing up old cars… I bought one of these a month ago and have had no problems with it. Saturday I tried to start it to no avail… This morning I started it with a jump and a huge plume of white smoke came out the tail pipe. The smoke did subside… Any ideas what could be wrong?
IIRC burning oil tends to have a bluish tint to it. Also, IME older vehicles tend let out quite a bit of exhaust until warmed up.
A little white vapor on startup is normal (water vapor in the exhaust gasses condensing in the cool exhaust pipe). Lots of white smoke is head gasket (plus your radiator water tends to disappear). Blue smoke on startup is valve guides/seals; blue smoke while driving is rings. Usually.
I stumbled across this website a while ago; perhaps you might find it useful:
It could mean you just elected a Pope.
The best way to see if it’s a head gasket is to see if coolant is coming out the tailpipe when the car has been running a little while. Also, the car will at best run extremely rough if the headgasket is blown, and possibly not at all.
I’m interested to hear what that white smoke is, too.
I had a Mazda pickup that would occasionally blow out a huge dense cloud of white smoke- so huge that it would fill up the street for a couple of houses in either direction. I seem to recall that the smoke smelled lightly plastic-y.
It didn’t do it all the time and ran well.
I figured the problem would eventually reveal itself when something or other broke, but that never happened. I eventually traded the car in at a delaership and have always wondered why the car sometimes did that.
I think the plastic-y smell was probably antifreeze, which has a sweetish chemical odor.
Does the car hesitate or have a misfire? Blown gasket and seals can do that.
A penguin brought his car to a local shop for a similar mechanical issue. The mechanic told the penguin to come back in about an hour, so that the car could be checked and diagnosed.
The penguin waddledd off, got some lunch and some ice cream for a little chill and waddled back to the repair shop, a bit messier from his lunch and ice cream. Poor little guy had car problems and his flippers/arm aren’t best for holding ice cream.
When he stumbled into the garage, he asked the mechanic “What’s up?” The mechanic said, “Well it looks like you blew a seal.” The penguin said, “Nah, that’s just ice cream.”
You know, they don’t make jokes like that anymore.
It sure sounds like head gasket trouble. You could have a small leak at this point – and it may go away as the parts heat up. I’d take it as a warning sign, and get a valve job done while you can still drive to the shop.
Even if all you need is a new head gasket, since you have to remove the head to replace the gasket anyway, it’s standard practice to get the valves done while you’re at it. Except in rare circumstances, any vehicle old enough to blow a head gasket will benefit from a valve job.
Oh, cripes, I just blew ice cream out my nose reading that. He he he he
I believe that a shop can look for combustion products in the coolant to see if there is a problem. Alternatively, check the oil and see if it looks ok. If it looks like a milkshake, then you have coolant in the oil. Both would indicate a head gasket problem. Either way, you want to fix it soon.
Congrats on the Scout. A mighty fine vehicle.
So I’m in the burbs of Philly last weekend and I see a Caddy that isn’t more than a couple of years old driving down the street blowing white smoke out of it’s exhaust pipes. This isn’t start-up vapor, this is continual white smoke, something-is-terribly-wrong, smoke.
What could this be except another crappy GM engine? Never seen this out of a Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Subarau or even a Ford or Chrysler POS.
OK dopers, (as Marvin Gaye would say) what’s going on?
My Dodge POS blew a gasket. I blew a fan belt, and also noted that my radiator needed replacing. My mechanic disagreed about the radiator, and said he’d do the fanbelt now, and work the radiator in the following week. So I can’t tell you how much it would cost to replace one.
Ice cream huh, OK, if you say so. 
My old Mercedes 190E would start from cold in a plume of dense white exhaust smoke, but once warmed up would run clean. I eventually traced it to oil being burned off in the air filter. The filter housing lid had a foam pad on the underside and a breather pipe from the rocker cover entered the air inlet on the manifold side of the filter, and over the years the foam pad had become saturated with oil. Cleaning it all up and a nice new bit of foam cured it, though I swear the engine burned oil through the breather pipes still, as it would need about 2 pints every 1000 miles, there were no oil leaks at all, and the piston seals were still good on the 70,000 mile engine.
Can a car normally burn oil (in vapour form) through the breather pipes in this fashion, or did I have a blocked tube somewhere? I find it odd to think that an engine has been designed to burn off the more volatile hydrocarbons in the oil, though I suppose it would keep it from thinning out too fast, albeit at the cost of ever-shrinking volume and the need for frequent top-ups.
If anyone wants, I can refer them to a place that does used coolant chemical analysis… kinda’ geeky, but if you want a chart showing the sodium levels in your Dodge Dart’s Prestone…