My 1989 Ford F-150 Drives Again Thanks To Some Magic Blue Liquid

First of all, I hope everyone had a lovely holiday, whether you celebrated the Passover or Easter or magician David Blaine’s birthday or whatever. Personally, I celebrated in two ways: I continued to refrain from eating anything leavened because I wanted to remember that it would have been deeply, richly crappy to be forced to build big dumb statues of some Pharaoh, and I took a trip with my kid into some lovely parts of Virginia. In my 1989 Ford F-150 that, about a week ago, couldn’t drive for more than 10 minutes without producing so much steam it made the view out the windshield look like a 1940s noir detective film.

You may recall my last wrenching update, where I made a little bit of progress on my Citroën 2CV and took a big step backward with my F-150 when I was an idiot and used a breaker bar to tighten a nut on the truck’s leaky thermostat housing after I changed the gasket. Of course, it cracked, and I was geysering coolant from there.

So, I replaced it! That’s a whole new thermostat housing you see there, a new gasket, and the cooling system has been flushed and everything! It doesn’t leak anymore!

So that part’s great. The part that isn’t so great is that the head gasket and head are clearly borked, from an unfortunate overheating event that happened when my water pump died a while back. So even with the cooling system being intact, I’m still sort of screwed, in a big, expensive way.

Or am I?

I mean, I definitely am, but maybe there’s a way around, you know, doing the right thing. See, I needed to use the truck within the next couple of days, and at the moment, I lack the money/time/will/skills to do a proper head job on this engine, so I was on the verge of despair. But then I remembered hearing vague stories about a magical elixir that could do the job of skilled mechanics, just via the magic of a blue liquid!

Yes, a blue liquid, just like menstrual fluid or baby urine!

I’d never used any of these head gasket sealers before, so I got one with the evocative name Blue Devil and the excitingly bold promise of a “permanent repair,” which feels almost amoral. I’m not being paid by these indigo demon people, by the way, I just looked up these fluids and found some good reviews and figured, what the hell, I don’t really have anything to lose?

I always feel a little odd about liquids that claim to replace whole, genuine specialists, like Liquid Plumr or Janitor in a Drum or Liquid Lawyer, but I can’t reject something so potentially convenient just because it seems strange.

These fluids work because they have sodium silicate or some other similar “liquid glass” in them that flows through the cooling system and, when subjected to the heat and pressure at the point where there’s a leak between the cylinder head and the block, it flows in there and solidifies, forming a hard seal.

There are stories of people using this stuff and getting 10,000 miles or more out of the engine. And it seems that big, overbuilt, relatively simple engines like my 4.9-liter/300 cubic inch inline-six are ideal candidates for this magic goop. So I tried it.

And holy crap, it seemed to work! I took a shortish test run in the truck, but long enough where it normally would be pumping steam into the aether, and it didn’t overheat! It ran…basically fine? I had just enough confidence to try a two-and-a-half-hour trip, because why not? Life is for taking inane risks, right?

Other than a fun time with my kid, the point of the trip was to haul a new refrigerator to my friend’s mountain place, then go visit some other friends who also have access to a mountain place nearby. How do I know so many people with houses in the Virginia mountains isn’t clear, but whatever, it’s lovely country.

Since my truck is now mobile again and I needed the whole bed clean, I raked out months of pine needles and leaves and probably shredded documents from the squirrel community.

My cat Tomato offered precisely zero useful assistance, but remained to supervise my efforts, which I think he judged sub-par.

I did end up getting the bed cleared of detrius, and fridge-ready!

Incredibly, the truck made it! It was slow to start after one short pit stop, but other than that, it was pretty hassle-free? I took it easy on it, never rev’d above about 3000 RPM, but it was able to maintain 55-65 mph, no trouble.

It idles a bit rough, and there’s a bumpy spot between about 2000-2600 RPM that suddenly smooths out for reasons I don’t understand yet, but overall? It works.

I drove it to my friends’ place next, where we enjoyed some lovely and damp times with them and their family, interacting with cattle, and I offered to haul a bunch of trash from their property that had been languishing for a long time, because, you know, I drank their booze and ate their food and I should probably repay in some way.

Besides, what’s the point of having a truck if you can’t cram it full of crap? Oh, and I had my other friend’s old fridge in there anyway, so it’s not like I wasn’t going to take a trip to the dump as it was.

Mostly, I’m amazed at how well the truck did; the differences between doing a full head job and pouring some blue liquid in the radiator are vast, and it really feels like cheating that this worked as well as it worked. I read reviews and watched videos, yet somehow retained a bit of skepticism. But so far – knock on wood, spit thrice, all that – it seems to have, if not solved, at least managed the head gasket issue.

There was one concerning thing, though: when I finally got back home and parked by my house, I saw steam from the engine; I was fearful that I’d see it coming from the head gasket, but that wasn’t the case. It was much more exciting:

It was spraying from the overflow/pressure relief nozzle under the radiator cap. I’d never seen this happen before. It continued for maybe a minute or so, then petered out. It didn’t do this any of the other times I drove it for similar lengths of time and then stopped, so I’m sort of baffled. It started and ran fine a couple of hours after this, too.

I’ll check the coolant level and see if I can see anything odd in there. I also checked the oil cap and didn’t see any Forbidden Mayonnaise, which happens when coolant and oil mix:

So, at this point, I’m not sure that was. The fact that I avoided a major repair with a liquid makes me think that there must be some consequences to pay, but as far as I’m concerned, this magic juice made my truck operational and proved itself on a not-insignificant trial run, so I’m just going to take this strange victory and enjoy a functional truck.

Even if it required a deal with the (blue) devil.

All photos by the author