1995 HondaCivEX

Can someone please help me out a little? 1995 Civic EX manual with 155K miles. Has always run terrific until recently. The symptoms are below.

1. Car randomly overheats...the gauge shows a hot reading temporarily and then suddenly the car cools back to normal. It's almost like the coolant is suddenly released to the engine and the engine very quickly cools.

2. When the car overheats, no heat comes out when you turn the heater on. (I turned it on to help cool the engine, but the air coming out is not hot.)

3. The car seems to be using a little coolant. If I fill the radiator, it will run for about a week without overheating at all. After a week or so, it begins to randomly overheat for a short time and then I fill the radiator with about 16 ounces of water and it is fine again. There is no visible leak.

4. I noticed that one of the plug wires was corroded where it connects to the distributor. The other three looked fine.

The car starts fine, the oil looks good, it does not smoke, and still gets around 30 MPG. I let the car run with the radiator cap off when I fill it to avoid air pockets in the cooling system. There is no smell of coolant and the carpeting in the car is dry. I replaced the thermostat a couple weeks ago and it did not solve the problem.

Here are my questions and I could really use some help. (I appreciate it!)

First of all, is this likely a head gasket?

Second, I just bought an 08 Civic. Am I better off repairing a head gasket (if that's the problem) and selling the car or should I just auction the car "as is"? The body is in terrific shape and the tires only have a couple hundred miles on them. I'm trying to figure out if I could get a decent price for the car.

Thanks very much for any input! I can use it!

Will

96 EX

Track down where you are losing coolant at. Being low can cause you to overheat which would be easy to do if its leaking/burning. While your at it I'd replace those spark plug wires as well.

1995 HondaCivEX

bump for help