So I finally put on my big boy pants and decided to tear down my engine to see if I had a blown head gasket and sure enough I might?? I drained the oil and good amount of coolant came gushing out then the oil. I took bank 2 cylinder head off and there was a bunch of coolant in cylinder 2. This is my first attempt ever in doing a head gasket. The process wasn't complicated but I'm not sure if I cracked head or engine. I looked at the sleeves and they look intact. Now this Coolant not filled by me but by Firestone, was the yellow universal peak coolant that replaced the coolant that I put in which was the Peak pink for land rover. Do you think this coolant could have jeopardized and possibly cause it to seep thru into the cylinders. And despite it overheating, is it possible I can get the motor to run again by replacing the head gaskets and machining the heads if needed or did Firestone screwed me by putting in the some universal crap? I posted pics for reference,

 

Firestone didn't cause your problem... Most folks ditch the pink and go to universal coolant anyway, the only important thing is to do a good flush first as they don't mix well... But that won't cause your issue.

Can't tell from your pics if you had an internal head gasket leak... Only you would know that by evidence of a failed gasket around number 2. Did you take a picture of the HG before you removed it from the block?

Chances are that was the issue, but again, we can't tell because you cleaned off the gasket before you took the pictures you posted.

 

Okay I wasn't sure if that caused it or not, I wasn't trying to blame them for that and sorry if it sounded that way. And that's the issue, I'm not sure what to look for in terms of a compromised engine or cracked head or gasket. How do I do a flush? Actually the head gasket was stuck on the cylinder head and I peeled it off quite easily. I'll take a pic of both front and back of the gasket you can get a reference.

Front side

Rear side

 

Was there any breaks in the gasket ?

 

What do you mean by breaks in the gasket?

 

'breaks' = gaps = leaks

like this:

 

HG looks fine, no breaks in it. 90% sure those are the OEM HG but your photos are not super high res and focused. If they are there will be a LR symbol over cylinder 7 on the top side of the gasket and a part number 50030 over number 2. Tell me the story of how the overheating started, miles on truck, how hot did it get. Did you drain the coolant before removing the head? How? Cross hatch in the cylinders look fine.

 

Oh yeah i didn't see any of that, I had those head gaskets changed back in 2017.

 

I don't remember where I bought them, I can look at them again later and take better pics. It wasn't overheating but I noticed the bottom hose leaking from the y pipe and I thought it was odd, I also noticed that reservoir tank would be really low ok coolant even after filling it up, it drain from the expansion cap hose.The hoses I bought from when I replaced all of the old hoses were from lucky 8. They are the ones with metal zip ties holding the hoses to the Y pipe. I decided to replace the hoses with genuine ones and then that's when I had the overheating issue. I made sure I bled it right but It was still overheating, I bought an ultra gauge and I would hey get temperature readings at idle up to 244 °F, I got fed up after a month and decided to take it to Firestone to have them do a block test. They did the a hydrocarbon and test and a pressure test and they said nothing came up everything was normal. They said they took a temperature reading with an infrared thermometer and an actual thermometer and they said the temperature was 189 °F give or take. They came to a conclusion that it was either the temp gauge in the instrument cluster or the coolant temp sensor that was bad and I asked them twice if I could drive it. They said yes so I took their word for it and then two weeks later I noticed the coolant tank empty with no visible evidence of it leaking on the ground. So that's where I'm at, coolant in the cylinders and oil. It has 187000+ miles. I didn't completely drain the coolant but I opened up the hoses to relieve some of the coolant by taking off the top hose and letting loose. Tho I think it's my fault now that I'm thinking that I didn't completely drain the coolant. I just got so fed up with these lousy *** mechanic shops that I decided to do it myself but I jumped in before doing some research or asking questions. And I'm sorry but I'm not sure what you mean by cross hatch in the cylinders. Yes I know I'm a noob when it comes to the engine but this is my first attempt ever at doing a big job like this.

 

Ok, that all makes sense. Based on the photos it looks like your hg was leaking coolant externally down the front of the block. There is a small spot on the bottom of the outside edge of the coolant hole next to cylinder #2 where it looks like it was leaking. The normal cause of blown hg is overheating. The normal cause of overheating is low coolant or stuck thermostat. The normal cause of low coolant is deterioration of the polymer components in the system or a worn water pump bearing/seal.

Other points to note:

• Water in the oil is normally caused by blown front cover gasket, which is caused by overheating.
• Not draining the coolant is why you have so much in the cylinders.
• Temp sensors do go bad, checking with an IR gun is the correct way to confirm that.

Your mileage is a little high, but I can tell by the photo of the cylinder wall that it is in relatively good condition - would just need to make sure they all look like that. The cross hatch is the patterns on the cylinder walls from the factory honing.

At this point the most worrying thing is the coolant in the oil, I would remove the front cover and look for a blown gasket. If you can confirm a blown front cover gasket you can risk putting new gaskets back on it with an inline thermostat to control the temperature. If you really wanted to be sure you were good to go you could hot pressure test the block, but that is pretty involved to get the hardware and conduct that test.