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It depends. Quite often a blown head gasket is just a symptom, the car may have been overheated and driven a long ways and that may have warped the cylinder heads. Now sometimes it’s just a $30 head gasket, which you may be able to do yourself for no labor $$$, but sometimes it’s a $300 head replaning job and sometimes it’s a $1200 new heads job. Or worse, it’s possible that the aluminum head bold threads are stripped, then it’s even more.
You also have to consider what the rest of the car needs. Often a car that has been perhaps mishandled and driven rough will have other and expensive maintenance problems.
It cost me $1600 to have the head gasket replaced on my Accord last summer. That included having the head machined because it had warped.
That is a lot of money to invest in a car. If the rest of the car is in solid condition, and the price is dirt cheap it may be worth if. If you are capable of doing the labor yourself, that makes it more likely to be a good investment, but you have to look at the total cost of the job, plus the car, and compare that to what it would cost your to buy a similar car, in like condition, but without the bad head gasket.
If you could get a similar car without the problems for about the same as it would cost to buy this car and fix it, then I would say it is not worth it. If a similar car would cost hundreds more, then perhaps it is worth the cost of fixing this one.
For starters, you don’t know that it has a blown head gasket. You wont’ know for sure until you remove the cylinder head. It would be better to say that you have a combustion leak into the cooling system instead of just calling the head gasket. Sure the head gasket is the most likely cause, but it could just as easily be a cracked block or cylinder head. Don’t make assumptions, especially when purchasing a new car. That said, if it has a problem like that, it could also have other problems that could be equally or more expensive. Good luck and keep us posted.
http://www.ericthecarguy.com/faq/what-to-look-for-in-a-used-car-purchase
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