i have a 99 deville i bought in jan. previous owner said he had an overheating issue, but after he installed a new thermostat and water pump it was ok. i have only put 200 miles on it since buying it, but now it is overheating again. i checked the purge line.ok. new thermostat. flushed the radiator in top hose and out the bottom. took it to a garage and the drove it three times before it finally overheated, so they did a block test and there is exhaust gasses in the coolant. which indicates bad head gasket. they told me they dont have the proper tools and it requires 20 hours to repair. my question is if anyone has been through this? what or how they repaired it? ive read about the bars leak and it sounds like it wont work on the northstar motors since it caused by the bolts pulling loose rather than just a bad gasket. has anyone done anything differently to escape the costly repair of taking the engine out to fid this?

 

I'm afraid you're a bit out of luck. The north star is a great engine, but prone to head gasket failure -- and worse, the heads are known to warp easily when hot, being aluminum. The only "ideal way to fix this would be to remove the heads, either have them planed true, or better yet replaced, or, and this is actually easier, replace the engine. Went through this problem with my 98 sls. You can find an engine at a salvage yard (make sure it's been block and compression tested) for about $650. I worked a deal for mine at $500 and it only had 80k. You can try the bars leak temporarily, but it being aluminum, it doesn't work so well. You can also dump a good amount of ginger powder in the coolant. It coagulates at cracks and hardens to a putty like substance. This was an old 60s fix for cracked heads and radiators. Farmers have done it forever on tractors too....in fact, GM uses a chemical mixture that contains ginger powder on their engines at the factory.