So after putting $3000 into my wife's 2006 2.0 Quattro this year -new tires, rear springs, rear cv shaft, timing belt, water pump, thermostat and all the pulleys etc., the head gasket seems to have gone. There is antifreeze in the oil and I have had to add about 3/4 gallon of coolent in the last week/10 days. The car only has 93,000 miles and is in really good shape, but I just don't want to put a few thousand more into it at this point to have the head gasket replaced. Was hoping to get just a little more time out of it though before getting into a new car, and wanted to know if anyone has had any experience with steel seal head gasket sealer?

 

Update #1 - So the car was running great, no cel's, no smoke out the tailpipe. There looked to be antifreeze in the oil, but before I tried the Steel Seal I wanted to make sure the head gasket was gone. Speaking to a friend who is a mechanic, he said that unless the car overheated (which it hasn't) a head gasket should not go at 93,000 miles. So, I bought one of the vacuum test kits with the blue liquid and pump on Amazon for $45 and tested it to see if there was combustion gases leaking into the coolant, and there was. The blue liquid turned yellow which confirms the head gasket. I assume the leak was minor or caught very early, since the car runs great other that the loss of coolant. So according to Steel Seal you should change the oil if there is coolant present, which upon draining the oil it was clear that the coolant was in the oil, and I drained the coolant, as best I could, by draining from the fitting on the lower hose. I filled the overflow with distilled water and drained again to make sure the overflow tank was clean. I filled the engine with a little less than four quarts of oil, the directions recommend one quart low, and filled the coolant tank with distilled water which is what is recommended. I then drove the car on the highway keeping it in fourth gear so the rpms would stay at three thousand rpms, as directed, and drove it ten miles, took her home, topped off the oil and coolant with more water. I should mention that before using the Steel Seal I could hear gurgling noises coming from the motor after shutting it off. After adding the Steel Seal and going for the ten mile drive I could hear the same gurgling noises after turning the car off. Today I checked the fluid level, topped it off between the min and max line with more distilled water and drove the car about thirty miles. The car ran great, as it did before doing all this. When I got home, and shut the car off, the oil looked fine, the coolant level had not dropped, and I noticed there were no gurgling noises coming from the motor this time. I am thinking that maybe the noises may have been coolant going either into or out of the leak in the head, but that's just a theory. I plan to put five hundred miles on the car and see what happens. If I don't have coolant going into the oil, I will change the oil again and drain the distilled water and replace it with the proper coolant water mix and update this post to let everyone know.