A quick look at the MG Rover forums and you will see HG failure is one of the most common issues. Unfortunately like Grumpy said the problem cannot be fixed completely however if the repairer knows what he is doing they can be repaired to give another 50,000 or 60,000 trouble free miles. My car will be dead and buried before it ever reaches that many more miles since I changed mine. Mind you I'm still paranoid about the water level in the coolant tank.
I wrote this a few weeks ago in the K series sticky thread.
"Most of what has been said in this thread is of no help to anyone stupid enough (like me) or unfortunate enough (someone who didn't know any better) to buy a 1.8 petrol Freelander.
As far as
Head gasket failure is concerned most times it happens there is plenty of warning but it is either missed or ignored. My company car gets serviced by a garage every 18000 miles and in between times, the only reason I lift the bonnet is to fill the washer bottle.
If you have a K series then that regime doesn't work. You must regularly (weekly) check the coolant level hasn't dropped and the dipstick is clean (no white creamy residue). This is especially true if your car has done over 40,000 miles since the last
head gasket change (yes they can go that often).
If the coolant level has dropped then find out why. Besides the obvious "Your
head gasket is gone" that everyone loves to shout. There are lots of hoses that can fail, as can the header tank and the seal at the water pump, but topping it up and driving on without curing the problem is a stupid and ultimately very expensive thing to do.
If you catch a headgasket failure early it is a reasonably straight forward thing to fix and needn't be that expensive. If you wait until the car has come to a halt with steam pouring out then it will be.
For the record I bought a 1.8 Freelander with 105,000 miles on the clock. I bought it with no service record or warranty but was able to use that to beat the price down. It came as no surprise when 2 months after buying it I found Mayo on the dip stick. My theory was at that mileage it probably already had the
head gasket replaced at least once and if it was only once then it was due to go again.
Replacing the head gasket cost me around £250 as I could do the job myself and would have been cheaper but I ran into some very unusual issues.
The point of all this is lots of people talk a lot of rubbish about K series engines needing replaced if the HG goes. They do fail more often than is acceptable but with a little common sense and regular checks they can be repaired.
If you are not prepared to open your bonnet once a week then run a mile from a petrol Freelander.
If you enjoy a challenge, don't mind getting your hands dirty and want to save between £1200 and £1500 on the cost of buying a Freelander over an equivalent diseasil then go ahead. But you have been warned."
