leaking head gaskets

Disappointment just landed. My 1979 264 GLE with 87000 km, a beautiful body with most everything in good nick has leaking heads (B27 engine). So my dilemma is whether to fix it properly, give up on the motor and replace it or the car, or even maybe just run it 'til it dies and maybe prolong its life with some type of chemical goo to seal up the head problem. In Australia 240's are cheap and reasonably plentiful but I don't know that I could be bothered to swap over the engine with all the complexities that job entails. Thanks for your thoughts.

I hear they are a nightmare to work on. Don't use chemical seal, The B23 needs to be well looked after, I read thy suffer from cam rattle (worn cam bearings) if the oil isn't changed religiously which kind of writes of the heads/engine anyway. May be worth checking for this before a head gasket change is done. V8 conversion?

ripped off again makes a good point, are you sure its not just leaking a bit externally? you can test for a headgasket failure using an exhaust gasses detector kit that you put over the expansion bottle filler hole and draw gasses up through this little vial thing, depending on the colour it shows if exhaust gasses are present in the coolant, another easy thing to do is a compression test. Most garages will carry out these tests for you though it may be cheaper to buy your own equipment. (EBAY)

Thank you, gentlemen. I'll get a compression test. I'm not a mechanic either but will the results tell if the problem is a headgasket or, say, a bad piston ring?

If I can shed some light on this problem I've got a couple of 240 series Volvos one of which has had a succession of head gasket problems for the nearly 18 months. It's a 240 estate 1984 vintage but was bought with only 176,000 on the clock (which is still pretty modest for one these as I know someone with the identical model/year which had done 600,000 on the original motor!) We had the car into the garage with the typical "cappucino" goo under the filler cap and resgistering on the dipstick which always signifies big bucks at the beginning of 2008. Had the cylinder head machined, gasket replaced etc but a few months later same thing happened again! Needless to say the garage was a bit shamefaced, tossed the original head out and fitted another machined and crack-tested head just for the labour cost. Guess what? Another number of months later gasket goes again!?! This time around he secured another head and did the whole job AGAIN gratis. What he told me was that once a head gets to that sort of age it can happen very readily, he was pretty dark on his crack-testing cohort though! As far as the head gasket blowing he said that it was the coefficient of movement bewtween the cast iron block and the alloy head that caused the gasket to chafe and eventually let go. BTW I don't neccesarily believe a conversion to a 4 from a six cylinder would be that big a deal as long as all vital components are available for the swap (engine mounts will differ just for a start...)