“That milk shake brings all the wrong boys to yer yard… along with a hefty repair bill.”
A single mother of six kids takes her vehicle into the repair shop for what should have been a routine oil change. Unfortunately, the mechanic finds an ominous sign under the hood. Here’s what happened.
Facebook creator Nathan Coleman posted the video to his account two weeks ago. The video shows him under the hood changing the oil of a vehicle. When he takes the bolt off and lets the old oil flow out, he gets a nasty surprise.
The oil in the car looks like hot chocolate instead of the black color it should be. “What I show the single mom of six kids,” Coleman writes in the on-screen caption.
In the video’s comments section, viewers diagnosed the problem and answered the question Coleman transcribed in the caption. “Will it be done by tomorrow?” Almost certainly not.
One commenter asked, “So, as an uninitiated viewer, why is that oil so beige? Is it something other than oil?”
The people in his replies had his back. “As others have said, this is a classic example of a blown head gasket,” wrote one person. “Coolant is leaking into the motor oil. What others have not said is that this is a critical problem that must be fixed in order to have an operable vehicle again, and it is not a cheap fix.”
The commenter continued, “The engine has to be mostly disassembled to get to the head gasket and then reassembled, and then both coolant and oil will need to be drained, flushed, and refilled. It’s a very, very expensive repair.”
Another viewer said, “It’s known as the forbidden chocolate milk.”
The head gasket is the part of the engine that prevents coolant and oil from mixing. If the gasket blows, those two fluids will mix and form the sludge we see in Coleman’s Facebook video.
Not only does this contaminate the oil, but the coolant level isn’t where it’s supposed to be anymore. That can obviously lead to overheating, which is bad news for the entire system. In addition to oil color, drivers should also be on the lookout for white smoke coming from their exhaust pipes, low coolant levels without an obvious external leak, bubbles in the radiator, and engine misfires.
And, yes, this is an expensive issue to resolve. A blown head gasket replacement can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $6,000, depending on the market and your mechanic’s labor rate.
This Instagram video from the repost account Invention shows what that looks like from inside the engine. Someone in the comments section said, “I always thought it looked more like peanut butter.”
Another person quipped, “How to make a mechanic the most expensive vanilla macchiato ever.”
A mechanic weighed in to say, “That’s not that bad. It still flows like liquid. I’ve taken apart dozens of engines with bad intake gaskets and it looked like soft baby poop inside.”
Motor1 contacted Coleman via Instagram direct message for comment. This story will be updated if he responds.
We want your opinion!
What would you like to see on Motor1.com?
– The Motor1.com Team