QuestionI have a mustang gt convertible with a 4.6 v8 sohc engine. The problem I am having is when I start the car, which starts right up with no problem, after about 3 to 5 minutes, it starts to smoke alot, thick white foul buring smelling smoke, and the engine idles rough like its missing. When I pull off, and accelerate, the exhausts starts to smoke extremely heaviliy to which I cannot even see behind me no more...(james bond smoke screen) Now when I get on the highway, and start to speed up, it still smokes heaviliy, but after about two miles or so, it stops, and when I get off the highway and come to a stop, it doesnt smoke anymore....all the while driving, I feel no loss in power really, just a slight rough idle, vibration in the motor, but power is there with no problem. When this started happening, I made some upgrades thinking that it would solve the problem, 70mm throttle body and new intake plenum, accel coils, platnum motorcraft spark plugs and 9mm wires, oil and filter change, but still the same things happen, just a little more power than before I noticed after the upgrades. I was told a have a faulty fuel injector over cylinder 3 which I havent changed yet, and I also noticed that there is a milky substance in both tail pipes, a little more on the passenger side, same side as the bad fuel injector, when I touched it, it seemed like a mixture of oil and water, it was kind of brown and white-ish. Some mechanics told me it could be that the head is warped or bad, or a cylinder may not be working, or it could be the gaskets on the intake manifold as well as the heads could be bad....... I was told maybe it would be best to just get another engine and swap it out, rather than deal with the heads and intake..... I wanted to know if you have a different say to all of what I explained, just to get more information on what is best for me to do. This car starts and drives with power, with the exception of a little restriction on acceleration and rough idle, missing....but this white smoke is covering everything I pass, do you know what could be causing the problem??? Thanks for reading this very long question.
AnswerI found you're question in our question pool.You are looking at one of two things.Either a blown intake gasket or head gasket.Probably the latter.Unfortunately the only way that you are going to be able to tell if the head is warped is at a machine shop.Depending on whether or not you ever ran the engine hot will be whether or not to rebuild or replace.The oil and water mixture in the tail pipe are the key.That says that you are passing both coolant and oil into the combustion chamber.
