Silly question, I know. The obvious answer would be no.

I've replaced the throttle body gasket last year which took care of a a leak there and it was fine after that. Lately,though, I've started smelling coolant when I shut the truck down. I'm not able to find the leak.

Shortly after I bought it, I had to replace the water pump for a similar leak. Turns out it was coming from the weep hole. This was at 48,000 and 18 months ago.

The oil pump had just failed on the PO and they had it replaced.

This might be a long shot...but I'm thinking that perhaps the oil pump stress failure has also caused some issues with the water pump as they are part of the same unit, more or less. Could be a mating surface being eroded...warped shaft..or sumpin' along those lines.

Even if I'm wrong about the water pump, that still leaves the head gaskets as the next suspect in the chain.

I've only put 10k on the clock in the 18 months that I've had it. It splits duty with my car as a daily driver half the time and is a garage queen the other half. Point being, I don't put a lot of miles on it and it's mostly around town with garages nearby if needed. With snow around the corner, though, I'll probably be taking it out more this winter.

Since I'm planning on replacing the engine with an '04 when the current engine fails, I'm wondering if it would be worth my time to bother with the leak. So long as I'm on top of refilling the resevoir, I'm inclined to let it continue leaking. Money wise, it's a lot of coin towards a used '04 engine.

Thoughts?

 

I wouldn't worry about it as long as you stay in town and keep a gallon of coolant with you.
You are planning on replacing the engine anyway, so start shopping around for your replacement.
Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I would change the oil and put in full synthetic and then just drive it and never do anything, even oil changes.
Just top off the coolant and oil as needed and when it blows up you will have your replacement in the corner of the garage with all new gaskets just sitting there waiting for its chance to shine.
Take care of the rest of the truck, still use premium gas, but do nothing else.

 

Probably the leak isin the back of the engine, if you get under the DII and look at where the starter is, you will see anti-freeze seeping from the back of the cylinder heads.

The leak starts at the intake valley gasket in the rear. I have seen thisproblemon the 4.0 and the 4.6. I fixed it on my 2004 DII which had less than 25 K Miles on it.

What causes this leak is the heat cycling of the engine that gets driven short distances.

So, check it out and I am betting that you will see the leak there and replacing the valley intake gasket will fix it.

 

Just crawled up for another peek.

There's beads of Dexcool along the bottom of the engine on the passenger side, some of which are even working their way down to the transmission.

I also saw some wetness at the front, but no droplets...just a glaze.

So long as the rate of coolant loss doesn't get to the point of where I'm adding a few times a week then I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

I've gotten 10k out of it after one oil pump failure. I think I'm doing pretty good given what could have happened had the PO not been quick with the off switch.

 

I have an 03 that was using roughly a liter of fluid per week. If you see fluid coming down from the bell housing onto the cross member bar then I would say changing the valley pan gasket will take care of it... I did that to mine and no more issues... I also discovered the rear bolts (closest to firewall) were finger tight that holds down the valley pan gasket...

 

Discoklein, 1 liter of fluid per week is already too much. My 2000 D2 has been seeping fluid for about 25K miles when I did the heads the first time at 106K. Towards the end I was loosing about a quart (almost a liter) every 15 days.

 

It started small and slowly got to that point, probably over the course of 3 or 4 months time... I got a complete head set for it thinking it was going to be one of the head gaskets but its been a year and she is holding coolant for now...

 

I fully expect it to get worse. I'd probably be losing a lot more coolant if I drove more than a 100 miles/week.

I'm just not sure that a few hundred dollars and a weekend (and a month of troubleshooting!) are worth the effort given that I'll be swapping it out entirely in a year or so. This assumes, of course, that the replacement oil pump doesn't fail before then.

That being said, a year - 18 months is a long time to drive it while leaking. To be safe, I think that I'll pull the trigger and get the gasket kits and head bolts. I'll be replacing the gaskets on the replacement engine, anyway.

No harm in them sitting around that long, right?

 

I've had extremely great success with KleenFlo rad stop leak. It's the metal powder kind that makes its way to the leak easily since it's attracted to the location by the loss of pressure. It doesn't clog anything except the whole. Lower the level in your expansion tank using a turkey baster or the likes, in a bottle put some coolant half way and empty the container in it. Shake well and put in the expansion tank. adjust the level in the trank and go for at least a 30 minutes highway ride. when you come back the leak should have stopped.

I know about the hype regarding rad stop leaks, and aggreed with it until I was stuck with the problem and did some research. Like anything else, it has evolved with time and is not about clogging everything else. At least some products are like that and KleenFlo is one of them.

 

Just go get the coolant system pressure tested and then go for the repair.