Coolant leaking past lifter, onto camshaft and into crankcase-yeah, that' what I said

[mooncruiser]

Yeah, sounds like you need to dust off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

The block will be worth enough as scrap to at least get a couple of beers.

Yeah that or a boat anchor. I'm just going to pull everything off the block for for spares, at least I know I have a good useable head if I need it down the line. I've never hoped for bad news from the machinist more than I have for this head. Really hoped he would have found it warped or cracked!

 

[IOPort51]

Is this a AMC 258 i6 / 4.2l head or a 4.0 head??

 

[mooncruiser]

Is this a AMC 258 i6 / 4.2l head or a 4.0 head??

It is a AMC 258 i6 / 4.2l head

 

[Stoffregen Motorsports]

Yes I did, the head is perfect and not warped and valves are sealing like they should. He said that I most likely have a crack in the block. We had an extremely cold (for us desert dwellers) January last year and a lot of people were not prepared-had a couple days where it dipped to the low teens and did not go above 30. One day it stayed below 25 so it froze a lot of things. I lost 4 California Pepper trees on my property.
So, lots of broken pipes and many people with older vehicles that weren't running anti-freeze cracked some blocks. I talked to a couple different machine shops and they were quite busy last year.
When I first picked up this Jeep it had a leaky freeze plug on the exhaust manifold side-I replaced those and they were extremely corroded-paper thin from corrosion(idiots that only run water). One fell into the block and I was able to reach in and pull it out with my fingers. There was lots of "" laying along the bottom of that water jacket. I'm afraid someone has been chasing this problem for awhile. Lucky me!

Well I vote for gasket, or a cracked head. But without seeing it I've no way of knowing for sure. Either way, unless you find some other smoking gun, the head has to come off.

Sucks, I know.