Head Gasket? Or what?

[Happy_Go_Lucky]

Is there an easy way to be certain if your head gasket has gone south? My 535 broke a hose connector on the heater control valve and lost it's coolant. Fortunately it happened very close to home. Replaced this, topped up the coolant, started her up to bleed the system, and ended up over heating the motor at idle, while bleeding the cooling system. Now she starts with a mission, won't idle, and is as rough as anything. Feeling the headers after a few minutes of this, 1 thru 3 are ice cold, while 4 thru 6 get hot. There is no tell-tale oil in water, water in oil, etc. How can I be sure it's the gasget. I don't have a compression tester :(

[shogun]

to be certain, you need at least this
http://www.thetoolwarehouse.net/shop/UV-560000.html

[DaveVoorhis]

Start by getting a compression tester...

[Ross]

A lack of circulation could have caused overheating and the accompanying pressure rise, this perhaps broke the hose connection and is still the cause of overheating. I suspect your miss on cyls. 1-3 is coincedental and likely an electrical issue, possibly coolant got somewhere it's not supposed to be.
You are going to need some tools to diagnose this.

[wiggywigton]

I just went through the exact same thing. Might be as easy as disconnecting the battery for 10 mins to allow for the computer to reset. Worked for me. I'll keep my fingers crossed for ya.

[Happy_Go_Lucky]

A lack of circulation could have caused overheating and the accompanying pressure rise, this perhaps broke the hose connection and is still the cause of overheating. I suspect your miss on cyls. 1-3 is coincedental and likely an electrical issue, possibly coolant got somewhere it's not supposed to be.
You are going to need some tools to diagnose this.

Ok, so another lesson has been learnt. Firstly, there never was an original heating problem - methinks the hose connector broke from pure age and fatigue, but I digress - back to the "blown head gasket" :p I finally, without the tools to diagnose, pulled the head off to find ... wait for it ... *nothing wrong*. The head and gasket were just perfect. Close inspection found the head and block to be in a good nick, so what caused the problem? While bleeding the coolant after top-up (remember the broken hose connector?), the steam spray got into the distributor cap. It was soaked inside! Thats where the mis-fire was comming from, and the cold headers on 1-3. Well, on the bright side, taking the head off gave me the opportunity to fix that long-standing oil leak on the upper timing chain cover, a job I've been putting off for ages :D