Ford 4600 head gasket?

"""I turned the fuel up a little bit but not very much"""" I was disking for the first time with a massively oversized disk, https://usfarmer.com/media/catalog/product//5/6/5648442_large_29190.jpg ,,,,,,, i was disking with it for the last 2 days and the tractor was full throttle, and was struggling, it was blowing a noticeable amount of black smoke the whole time, every time the disk sunk a little to deep , the water temp gage always rose a little bit, anyways , 1 day later i went to take off and i happened to check the radiator cap and didn't see anything in it, so i cold started it, and added anti freeze to it and filled up the tank, it drained the radiator within 5 minutes of idling and i seen it dripping out of the breather tube, and the oil pan is mixed with coolant. motor runs like a champ still , no smoke, no back fire , no nothin, just eats coolant, it has to be a head gasket ? i hope? i just hope the block didn't crack from the little time it was ran full throttle, cause i don't know when it lost it all, no external leaks, no smoke no nothin. please reply

Run that with coolant in the crank case for any time and you can rest assured the bearings will be ruined in no time. That disk is too big for the tractor, or so it seems. Its just shameful abuse to use a tractor like that.

You had best repair this correctly or you will lose that engine and you may have already done significant damage to it by now, coolant and crank bearings do not mix.

There's a reason the injector pump is factory set, increased fuel and load that exceeds the tractors design is foolishness, the 4600 is a well regarded tractor model that will serve any owner very well, makes no sense to abuse something like that, in my opinion.

Coolant for these is very important too, it needs to be maintained properly, cut 50/50 - 60/40 if you like, using distilled water and anti-cavitation additive. Run it without proper maintenance, coolant per the previous and expect coolant in the combustion chamber when it cavitates through.
Disc

Now look, yes i understand you. that disk pulling was a 1 time thing for a job. i take very good care of my ford 4600. i change the oil every 50 - 75 hrs!, do you wonder why i checked the radiator? i check that every month. and yes you are right i was pushing it, the only other reason i upped the fuel a little because i usually pull a 2 bottom plow in a lot of ground, like a lot. i could easily pull it in 6th gear, , i don't plow with it al the way down, but the fields that i plow and very sand soil, then all at once its like 3 feet of hard clay, and it would almost stall it, but with the fuel up a little, it can pull through them unexpected spots. yes the disk was to much, what i am asking is where i can get a head gasket and what model gasket do i need for my motor, i have to get the motor model and serial yet

I'm pretty sure the only engine the 4600 had was a 201

This site ( ytmag ) appears to sell them.

your CNH dealer carries them.

I guess you could check your engine casting number to make sure someone did not slip one of the smaller 192's or smaller engines in there ( 175.. etc.. ).
4600 engine gaskets from YT

Its hard to say, no coolant mixing with exhaust could mean crack in cylinder down low-or water port to oil return blown thru in gasket. I'd get oil/coolant mix out pretty quick. easiest fix I have had on an instant coolant dump was soft plug in top of head. under valve cover] blowing out.

You can get the gasket at the CNH dealer, you can order them off this site just the same.

You don't have to defend yourself here, the way you describe what you are doing would lead anyone to think the above. Think about it.

Check oil for level and condition/contamination daily, before starting, same with coolant, note any rises in oil level, both fuel and coolant.

Coolant in the crankcase, turned up pump, 2 days pulling a disc way too big for one of these, expect problems to arise when push it beyond its design limits, its going to get hot, the exhaust temp is going to certainly rise and if it was a turbo with an air filter that was due for service, a pyrometer gauge would also be in the red. MY 4630 would never handle that size disc in these soils, even with duals on, let alone trying to make it work, I would expect costly problems, just like you could be facing now.
CNH head gasket

CNH parts diagram

YT 4600 engine gaskets

Unless you have a dyno you really have no idea how much you turned it up or the guy before you turned it up either ? Just saying.

well , i know i didn't turn it up to far, because it hardly blows smoke, before hand their was absolutely none at all, nothing, now theirs just a little. and i can easily tell that it really boosted power by 7 hp at least.

i will be adding pictures to

So, what type of coolant did you put in? You do know that it is a parent bore block and that running it without coolant conditioner is not good. I don't know if you have a blown head gasket or not. You usually see bubbles coming into the radiator if you do. I would suspect you have a pin hole in a cylinder wall. It's just about as likely as a blown head gasket.

First off.... did you check the oil that morning before you checked the coolant? Was there oil in the coolant at that point in time or only after you added the gallon? If there was, and you ran it that way the day before... then the bearings are toast already...
As far as the coolant disappearance goes... there is an off chance it could be one of the internal core plugs in the top of the head. Sometimes they do rot out. Worth looking given the volume of coolant gone missing. Other possibility, which those engines are well known for... is a pinholed/perforated cylinder wall. A bad head gasket is certainly possible.... but given the nature of that engine I find most will pressurize the cooling system and push the coolant out the top if they burn the fire ring in the gasket. The odd one will dump to a main gallery but not too often....
So... at this point I'd probably pull the rocker cover and have a look in there and see if a core plug is bad. In seeing nothing, then I'd pull the oil pan for an inspection down there... and refill the cooling system and pressurize it if necessary to see if the coolant is coming down the cylinder wall or down a gallery drain.

In terms of fueling.... one would be wise to leave the pump alone on a 4600. It was already a fairly high spec for it's displacement and the tractor has none too much rad to cope with any 'extra' snort.
I don't believe for a second that it has anything to do with your present situation... but it will some day lead to a good cooking if you're not very vigilant... and probably cracked pistons or broken rings if you really push it too much.

Rod

OK, did you do ANY diagnosis? Or are you just taking a guess and going to start throwing parts at it?
First: Losing coolant. Bad news. Leads to overheating, and results in engine damage.
Second: Find out where coolant is going. Coolant in oil is BAD NEWS. Destroys engine bearings. Best not to run it that way.
Third: Pressure test of cooling system recommended. As others have said, it could be something besides a head gasket. Consider: if you change the head gasket and still have the problem, what then? You wasted the cost of the gasket set, the coolant refill, and your time to accomplish NOTHING. Well, now you know what is not the problem.

there are no external leaks , we just put a rebuilt water pump in it last year cause old ones bearings went out because it being 30 years old, and yes when we took old pump off , a lot of coolant drained from the reservoir. the only place its leaking is, into the block, i just half to wait till i pull the head off this coming weekend then ill examine everything and take pictures also. thanks so far anyways.

ok ,ok , oh ok, and ok. i never thought of pulling rocker cover off and pan off to see where it leaked down. good idea. i will try that, and heck not in a long time would i ever push this poor ford , this situation that i created was from one stupid mistake, i should had never done that disking job for a guy , that is the only time i was kinda forced to get it done and i really felt like a fool, other than that day, i baby it, like all i do is drive it around the farm and check on fields, and pull a 2 bottom plow a lot. now i have not ran the tractor since cause when theres a problem like this or to where I'm not quite sure about it, the whole battery gets removed from the tractor. especially when i find antifreeze in my oil pan. but the last question is would i be able to see if my engine crank bearings are still ok, like try and wiggle the crank that sticks out of the front?

you know i think it is a blown head gasket, because with little compression, to all at once a turned up pump, a 33 year old head gasket probably could not take that much compression. so it blew through all the way through the coolant to oil separator part of gasket.

If you ran it for any more than a few minutes with coolant in the oil you can pretty much bank on the bearings being toast. The only way you can really assess the bearings is to drop the oil pan and remove the caps and look at them. If luck is on your side then the crank won't be scorred but I wouldn't bet on that either. I think you're probably in for a significant tear down on this one... but you need to find out where the coolant got away first so you know how to proceed. If it's not a high hour engine and the block and cylinder walls are fine... and the crank didn't get marked up... then you can probably get away with a complete set of bearings, a set of rings for good measure and a gasket set. If you have a pinholed block then you're looking at boring and sleeving the block... and depending on where the pinhole is... mabey just junking it. Sometimes they leak from the bottom of the water jacket directly into an oil gallery and that's not so easy to repair. If it's a cylinder wall... then you can sleeve all three back to standard and if the pistons are good... reuse them. Or go buy a used engine... but that can be a pig in a poke too...

I wouldn't get too worked up about pushing the tractor. It was made to be pushed. There's more than ample design in it to take everything that engine has to give it, save the radiator. The way I look at it... if you didn't work it so hard that it ran steadily hot and stayed there... you did it no harm. This problem is just one of those sh!thouse bad luck things that happens.... not so much bad luck if it's a cooling system pinhole and you had 10 yr old antifreeze... but still not good luck. Those things require that the coolant be maintained and a conditioner added (DCA4) to the coolant to break the surface tension of the coolant and prevent the cavitation bubbles that lead to the pinholes.

Rod

Ok, well today i faintly managed to get it al teen apart and my brother and I pulled the head off. The head gasket was just fine, it looked brand new. cannot see any cracks anywhere, but one thing i noticed was that the radiator has a tank on the very top and a tank on the very bottom, well for the years that have gone by of using the tractor, the top tank has always been empty and would empty out. now the bottom tank on the other hand always was full and always held coolant, so its like the head block is cracked, we were thinking about taking the head to a head tester to see if the head has a crack, if is doesn't then we know that the block is cracked , meaning the motor is shot. ,

I don't know about the 3 cylinder engines but I personally know of 3 different 4 cylinders that had issues with coolant in the oil. One was a hole in the cylinder, another was a cracked main oil gallery into the cooling system, that one put oil in the rad too and one of our own had a core plug under the rocker arm with a pin hole in it.