What does Brown radiator fluid mean?
When it’s past its prime, it will become a brownish color and more opaque. If it’s in really bad shape, it will be a sludgy brown. This is what clean coolant looks like. Coolant is a 50-50 mixture of antifreeze and water. If coolant is left to deteriorate, it can take its toll on your vehicle’s cooling system.
What should the cylinder compression be?
Healthy engines should have compression over 100 psi per cylinder, with no more than 10 percent variation between the highest and lowest readings. With a compression tester, a few hand tools, and 20 minutes, you can try this yourself.
What causes low compression on all cylinders?
There are several causes you can eliminate if your cylinders are losing compression. Exhaust valves and air intake valves at the top of the cylinder can also get overheated, and leak gas or the valve seals can become too worn to seal the gas in properly. Either way, the result is often low compression.
How do you do a cylinder compression test?
Remove a cylinder sparkplug and screw or push the connector of the compression tester into a sparkplug hole. If it has to be held in place, hold it firmly to avoid leaks. Tell your helper to crank the engine for at least ten revolutions, or about six to eight seconds.
What should the compression reading be on a blown head gasket?
If the head gasket has burned at a location between 2 cylinders, you are going to have 2 good compression readings and 2 compression readings that will be 0 PSI. Let me give you a more specific example: Let’s say that my Jeep 4.0L Cherokee (or Grand Cherokee, Wrangler) gave me the following cylinder compression readings:
How is a compression test similar to a leak down test?
Testing compression is really nothing more than, a way to figure out which cylinder has a problem. If you do find any issues, the next step would be doing a cylinder leak down test. A cylinder leak down test is similar to a compression test; in that it tells you how well your engine’s cylinders are sealing.
What happens when you add oil to a compression test?
Your compression does not improve much, when you add oil. If two adjacent cylinders have lower than normal compression and injecting oil into the cylinders, does not increase the compression; the cause may be the head gasket leaking between the cylinders.