coolant mixed with oil will be a milky tan color, unless it sits long enough to separate (several hours), it will not be green. is the engine losing coolant? my xj taps, clacks and clatters like no other but the OA on it comes back spectacular every time. 245k miles at this point.

edit: and judging by that oil fill cap it does not have any coolant in it. google “coolant in oil” or something if you’ve never seen it first hand.

 

yeah agreed. Just by his description it sounded like coolant, but maybe its just the pictures, but i dont see anything in the oil.

 

^ +1 to all of that. A little clatter from a 4.0 is nothing to worry about, and is most likely just HLAs (lifters). It's very common for them to make noise after an oil change, especially when changing viscosity.

Troubleshoot and test rather than speculate.

 

Ok i just googled coolant in engine oil and it is definitely not that. It was really weird, you can't see it as much in the pics of the oil I posted but there was this almost metallic green hue to the oil, very strange.

The guy at the place where I took it to get the oil changed said maybe they used some sort of fluid to help reduce engine noise and maybe that caused that color.

After all this, I'm definitely not taking it on the grand canyon trip. I'll see how things go with it over the next week or 2 and just keep my eyes & ears wide open.


I appreciate all of the help and feedback guys & will definitely let you all know how things turn out.

 

I'd flush that stuff out quickly. Buy a few gallons of cheap oil, and do several changes, filters too, at very short intervals, like 100 or 200 miles.

Once it's cleaned out you can put some decent oil in it.

 

 

I'm not sure you can host here, so the best way I've done is to upload it to Google Drive or YouTube and link it :\

 

Dude, you started off with the right idea..head gasket. What you actually have is way more than likely the 2000 series head with the infamous world-reknown defect to crack. Am kind of stunned the thread went this far without that conclusion. You have pictures with nice bright green coolant on your rocker arms. You have pictures with what you thought was oil, leaking from between the block and the head, ...that is actually coolant. You have a cracked head. You will run rough. It may get worse. You can check very easily and at no cost. Go to AZ and borrow the Coolant Pressure Tester. Attach, pump up, and see if it inexplicably leaks down, ie, cracked head. There are oodles of other confirmatory tests, such as compression.

 

I'm thinking it is not the cracked head, because since I changed the oil, the dipping i am getting doesn't have any green tint to it. and the oil inside the valve cover isn't milky. I will do the test but I'm pretty sure it's not cracked. with that being said, when I do the head gasket I am going to replace the head anyway just because I don't want to double up on labor.