What are some signs that they're on their way out or completely shot? I just want to have an indication as to how to treat my motor and the situation before I can afford to get another motor.

 

On start up lots of white smoke, and it can smell a bit sweet because of the coolant.

Constantly having to fill up your coolant.
bubbles in the coolant from the combustion gases

You can do a compression test on your coolant system, and a combustion gas test to see if you have any carbons in your coolant system

hope this helps,

-Mark

 

If your coolant seals are on their way out, the only way to treat it is to rebuild.

 

Any coolant lost with no visible signs of a leak is in most cases traced back to coolant seal failer or cracked rotor housings. Seals get damaged by over heating or just age, cracked rotor housing are a result of over heating the engine.

 

Odd that it has pretty high compression o.O. But yes, the coolant does bubble =[. Well, I guess I'll just baby it until it blows or i have money for new motor/rebuild, whichever comes first. Thanks guys.

 

Well the Coolant seals don't really dictate compression as much as the Apex seals do.

Just make sure you have a jug of water with you where ever you go so you can top it up.

 

coolant seals generally don't affect compression.

you can try block weld or some other sort of high dollar headgasket repari type stuff.

 

The engine actually has great compression. However the seals are quite bad. As I explained to Hai, he can try driving it but he'll be stopping every day to bleed the air out of the system which isn't exactly fun when your on the side of the road all time.