Sven.mueller

This truck is a 1994 12v ram. I’m having issues with my rad bubbling at idle and started overflowing a little out the rad cap hole, now I put a pressure tester on to see how much pressure it makes in the cooling system while running and it never went past the 15-16 psi mark and it didn’t make pressure right away it took a couple minutes to build up pressure at idle. The history on it was I blew the head gasket a couple months ago so I put a new head gasket on aswell as a new cylinder head, which is from power driven diesel and they specified it comes machined. So I’m not sure what the issue could be and I’m really hoping it’s nothing caused by the cylinder head or head gasket. One thought is the cooling system could still have air in the system since it sat a while without coolant in it. I changed my thermostat aswell. Things to mention are the pressure seems to relieve after a couple hours, it doesn’t have excessive blow by and what I mean by that is only when it’s warm it’ll haze but nothing crazy, I don’t see coolant in my oil and I’m not positive about no oil in my coolant since I wasn’t able to flush all of my oil out of the coolant system, it also seems to run really good and no haze out of my exhaust, and I can’t see any external leaks on my engine, my heater works in the cab, and my truck doesn’t seem to overheat. Any help is greatly appreciated guys!

texasprd

You can get combustion gas detector kits that test the coolant for the presence of combustion gases - even Harbor Freight has them. The overflow isn't totally surprising, as coolant expands as temperature increases - I've fired up engines with the radiator cap off, and after a short period seen some overflow. If you're concerned that oil might be migrating to the cooling system, have you checked your oil level? I hate to suggest dumping what I assume is fairly fresh coolant - but if you can get to the block drains, consider draining the block and flushing the heater core so you have a better baseline for checking for oil in the cooling system.

What brand of head gasket did you use? There are some I wouldn't hesitate to use, and at least one I wouldn't take even if you paid me large $$.

Did you check the head and deck for flatness?

Sven.mueller

hey thanks for the reply, ya my next move is going to be getting a combustion tester and go from there, ya I’ve checked my oil and seems to be good but I’ll run it for a bit and then I might get a better indication. Ya I know I should’ve likely waited to put coolant in before I knew if it was running right or not. And I went with a mahle gasket which to my understanding is one of the better ones to buy but there can always be faulty ones in any brand. And ya I checked my head before putting on and seemed all pretty good but I never checked my block which I should’ve, but I guess my ignorance took over and I figured it’s not as common to warp a block, thanks for the info