I wish this were easy, but that's not my luck!
My current issue (I never fully fixed the last ones, but those areas are sorta working okay now, till the weather warms up) is as the title states, a sweet smelling exhaust and a slow loss of coolant. I understand that usually this is a head gasket related issue. I checked the oil and it's still dark, no milky color and needs a changing soon. Also, as far as my thermostat goes, my car has never come close to overheating (the fans still kick on, so it seems to be working).
I tried that garbage radiator stop leak stuff, and all that seemed to do is make me need to bleed the heck out of my system...

What's my next step from here? Should I do a compression test, or should I just pull the heads off straight away and check the gaskets? I'm not at home with my helm manual right now, so I'm not exactly sure how in depth the head removal is.
Thanks in advance!

 

For a marginal head gasket a compression test will often reveal no indication. What you need to have performed is a "Cylinder Leak-Down Test".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leak-down_tester

 

I was planning on taking the intake manifold off soon for some deep cleaning, would there be anything there that would reveal anything?

 

Depending on the location of the leak, a headgasket can leak coolant into the combustion chamber without leaking into the oil. In that case, the firing tip of one of the sparkplugs might look extra-clean. Kinda like it's been "steam-cleaned"...

There's coolant passages in the intake manifold & throttlebody. A leak from there can get into the intake manifold & get sucked through the engine that way. When you take off the IM, check it out for evidence of that.

 

Cool, thanks for the info! I might do the IM this Sunday, depending on how warm it is out. Luckily the v6 engine here makes it relatively easy to take out, I might as well check the injectors and clean them while I'm at it.

As for the spark plugs, I just changed them out last week, so they'd probably be clean regardless I think. I don't remember what the old ones looked like, but I don't really remember them being dirty at all, except for the standard slight blackening near the terminal. They were probably three or four years old though, so that may be a bit telling.

 

The old adage applies here, if they ain't broke, don't mess with them. The thing is, there is NOTHING (good) you can do for a fuel injector in this situation.

 

Ah, gotcha. Well in that case ill leave them alone!

I believe they're operating properly regardless, there are no codes or loss of power so they should be okay, I think.

 

So maybe this is related: I've been noticing sometimes my return radiator hose is collapsed. Its a hose, and I have to bleed it to get it round again. I bled the thing last night, hose was round, this morning I check the coolant and see that the hose is collapsed again...

 

What's the "return" radiator hose? One of the big radiator hoses? Check your radiator cap & check the small hose over to the reservoir.

When the coolant expands, the cap allows some to push over to the reservoir. When it cools down, the smallest disk in the middle of the cap opens to allow coolant to suck back into the radiator. When that smallest disk is stuck, or when the little hose to the reservoir is obstructed, then it can't suck back in.

 

Yeah, it's one of the big ones, the one that goes to the top of the radiator.

I just replaced the radiator cap, and the small hose seems to be fine. I'm assuming I got some air in the system from using that cooling system stop leak stuff.

There is no oil in my coolant, nor does there seem to be any coolant in my oil, so I'm hoping that it's somehow leaking in through my intake manifold somewhere, and I'll be able to find the leak when I pop it off here soon. Anything would be better than the head gasket, ha.