So I was driving my van up a long hill and I had it floored. Was doing around 75 mph in 3rd gear (about 4,500 RPMs) when I noticed in my rear view mirror a bunch of blue smoke behind me. When I pulled over I found oil dripping all over from between the engine and transmission. It was also covering the entire undercarriage and caked on the sides and back of my van! Well, looks like I won't be making it to my job so I call my customer & tell him what's going on. He's a nice guy and offers to come give me a ride home! So he picks me up and takes me home. Once home I hook-up my truck to my flat-bed and go get the van.

I decide to pull my engine. I could have got to this a bit easier by pulling the transmission, but this engine has over 200k miles on it, has a mild knock, and burns a lot of oil. I decided to pull the engine instead and swap it out. Here's the engine on it's way out & here's the blown seal:





Due to the higher mileage on this engine and due to the fact it was developing a knock, I decide to pull the engine from one of my "Chia" vans:





A little back-ground on this Chia parts van. I purchased this for $350 from a college kid back in 2004. It only had around 150k miles on it but had been neglected and he was running it with water in the cooling system . It ran good, had great power, but it would get hot. It also had a mysterious coolant leak. I would fill it up, drive it, and it would not leak. The next day I would check it again & the cooling system would be empty. I messed with it for a while (back then) but got frustrated with the leak and the hot running issue. Since it had some chassis rust problems (suspect it had been driven in salt water), I decided it wasn't worth messing with & parked it for parts. Fast forward 10 years.............

Here's the donor engine coming out:



Looks like I got my work cut-out for me.



Aha! Looks like I found my mysterious leak!





I knock out the freeze plugs and here's what I find behind the rear side plug:



Looks like I found my mysterious overheating issue!



Here's what I dug out, but there is a lot more in there.



I decide to tear this engine down & have a look at everything before trying to run it. I'll post more later. Tim