Coolant leak

[artur pivovari]

Hello everyone, I have this ram 1500 2011 4.7 v8 for 20k km so far and, I noticed coolant leak 3 times for the past 2 months. And i’m confused now, because I went to first mechanic and he said that it’s blown head gasket and leaking externally, the second mechanic did a leak test with pressure and no leak was found but there was some coolant left on the engine and he said that it’s front timing cover.
So yeah, the only weird thing for me is that sometimes it leaks, sometimes it’s not. today we put about 2.5 litres of coolant in radiator, because I checked only coolant reservoir before and it was full but radiator was 2.5 litres short.
As I understood It’s leaking on top and dripping down to the oil pan and I also could see some of it on the oil filter.
I took a detailed video of what is going on over there and uploaded it on youtube. https://youtube.com/shorts/hRYM9GYhnug?si=3FrZvowF3iFQQqqJ
Any help will be appreciated, thank you!

 

[rzr6-4]

In my experience those radiator pressure tests pretty much only show leaks in the radiator itself or the hoses. Water pump, head gasket, freeze plug, etc can all show a false negative.

I am never going to know what it is without climbing under your hood myself but I'm just saying the head gasket isn't ruled out yet just because of that pressure test IMO.

 

[Burla]

Coolant stops leaks are incredible products that actually fix leaks in the internals. Research that.

Stop a Coolant Leak Permanently with Bar's Stop Leak!?

Before & After results testing Bar's Permanent cooling system block Seal intake and radiator stop leak on a Radiator with a significantly large leak. As in t...

youtu.be

 

[Jeepwalker]

Yeah, I bought a well-used Fox body Mustang in the summer of 1988 for $25 (cash!! lol) from a local person I'd heard about ..with a known bad head gasket (4-cyl) the owner didn't want to repair and bought a different car. That was salvage price back then. I changed the headgasket, the head 'seemed' pretty good by straight edge. Didn't do anything to the head. So I put in some Napa liquid head gasket product which was a lot more expensive and different looking than Bars-Leak or the silver powder. Followed the directions on the can to a T. Yeah it worked.

We figured it was temporary and thought we'd have some "Fun" with it. My brother and I installed some bald Eagle GT's on the aluminum wheels we had laying around (we had a tire changer and all that), and it handled pretty well, for a car back then. We put a CB in it (to communicate), & took off and terrorized the back roads, drifting around corners, etc. Revving the heck out of it ....Squealing if we could (remember it was a 2.3L). We really gave that car a work-out ...Ok, it was a complete thrashing! ...figuring it would crap out and we'd just junk it in a couple days anyway. Nope! After a while we got tired of beating it and it became transportation to and fro. Then we decided to fix a few niggling things, clean up the interior,..Buffed it out some. It looked decent.

Essentially I drove that car for the rest of the summer till fall, then passed it on to my brother. He drove it an entire year, maybe longer. Then traded it off for another vehicle. Note: There was one time the 'fix' failed and it starting blowing great white smoke again. That time we just used Barsleak. And that seemed to work ok too.

So that's a true story from the 80's. I'm guessing the issue was a cracked head or block. For $25 we didn't dig into it too much.

I personally though would tackle the root issue on your truck though. It could be a coolant leak along the heater core plumbing path, Intake leak, Could be a head gasket. They can/do delaminate and can leak. But if you remove the head, have the head inspected because they had an issue with the heads for a while back then. But that issue was mostly the earlier 4.7's as I recall. It's a rock-solid engine otherwise. We have a Jeep G/C that just ticked over 240k with a 4.7. But early on when it was new, the original owner had both heads replaced due to coolant area cracking (that was back in like 03).

 

[1 MEAN66]

Coolant DYE!!!!!