Help, White smoke
 

Just installed new cam and heads in a 99 5.3

I just finished putting the motor back together and fired it up. All is good. Temp is good coolant is good, oil pressure is good, idle is good. I have white smoke coming from the exhaust pipe. I am not loosing coolant, the oil is clean.

The only thing i can think is its either the remnants of brake cleaner and hydraulic oil from the heads or when i removed the head coolant went into the y pipe and its burning off.

Am i missing something?

with the first few minutes its normal to see white smoke , even at the first WOTs

but , if this is still happning after tuning , then you might have to check the piston rings.

some ppl clean the cylinder surface and debres fall between the cylinder walls and pistons and starts hurting the rings/walls just as you start the motor

agine , I wouldnt worry about it untill I drive it for a while and tune it .

another thing might be the valve seals , some ppl forget to install them , I saw some that did

Well I am getting a miss fire from cylinder #8. I went ot go check and one of the heater hoses busted off. The white thing that looks like it clips over the heater core nipple. God I hope that is what is is.

Anyway. I took it for a ride and its better but i think that miss is not helping. It seems to miss at idle. I am getting it tuned this week. I also have a slight exhaust leak which is showing up in my LT fuel trims bank 1.

one more thing i forgot to mention before i broke the hose connector. My low coolant light is on.

those connectors break all the time, just cut the plastic left on the coolant nipple and hose clamp the hose, hmm you think the light is on cause you lost coolant when the nipple broke lol! add coolant !

As I said before the light was on before to hose snapped. i just got the part. Now to cut it off to reconnect so I see if I am still smoking or was it just burning off fluids in the motor and exhaust.

It is still smoking a bit, like when you start on a cold morning. The coolant went down a bit but the oil is still brown not milky. I think there was air in the lines and it worked out. I still dont feel great yet. It is running rich.

Is the smell of burning coolant sweeter? Im just trying to identify the cause.

All is good now. I guess it just needed to work stuff out of the motor.Thank you all who helped out. The truck is running fine, better with tune I hope.

Burning coolant does smell sweet if you burn enough of it. As you have already found out, yes the cooling system will have air pockets in until you bring it up to temp and crack the cap a couple of times to bleed the pressure out of the system.


And Yes, It should run better with a tune.


Glad you got it fixed :cheers: