car died... now what?

If we only had national car health care this would never have happened.

sorry to hear that . good luck to you on finding a solution. i would look into finding a reliable used car instead of repairs if it did actually require it.

take it to my mechanic Kim's Smog Auto Service on corner of western and Carson in Torrance. I just had an issue with my celica overheating and he was able to fix it after replacing the thermostat. it looked like it was not going to be fixed but he kept at it coddling the engine with some liquid and after retesting several times it finally settled and was normal. so this may happen to you if your mechanic is more thorough maybe he is but all i know is my mechanic is very competent, patient and will explain everything to you.
his phone is (310) 782-1100
you do not have to mention my name, no i m not affiliated with him other than he is just my mechanic

Provided you are not loosing coolant, there could be a problem with the water pump, a blockage in the radiator or something else wrong. You should consider getting a second opinion. If it does turn out to be the head gasket, on a civic, it is not that difficult to replace.

+1 on a second opinion.

Try repairing it yourself. I had a 92 Nissan Sentra that was overheating and I just used the internet and got all my parts from a junk yard. Saved me hundreds of dollars and the car worked fine. I also had no clue what the hell I was going when I started. A 93 civic is gonna have an engine thats really easy to work on so its worth trying.

alright, supposing you don't feel like repairing it, just check on kellys blue book or one of the alternatives. another thing you can do is try looking around for similiar cars of that shape and see what they are attempting to sell for. at some point or another you hit the stone wall. this is the point where it just isn't worth the money to fix the car. i done all of my repairs on my cars myself. i had a '92 buick regal. i think it was all the brakes (pads and rotors) had to be replaced. well the price for the parts alone was roughly 1/3-1/2 the cost of the car. then even i were to fix that, other parts were probably soon to go out. so i just decided to get a new car as it would be financially more sound to me for the future. thats my input. so in summary, decide the value of the car, then decide the value of the repair. decide from there.

I would think that the overheating lead to the blown gasket
not good to drive around on an overheated engine

93 with tons of miles I'd replace it who knows what else will go wrong

+1. Try to get a few hundred bucks out of it, then put that toward another car. This just seems like a money pit to me. Get out while you can.

The mechanic couldn't reproduce the problem, even though you had coolant spraying out everywhere? Coolant systems are pretty straightforward to fix even for the most dimwitted mechanics. Driving it so many times with the engine overheating probably did no favors for that engine.

I had a similar problem on my '00 Civic. On two or three occasions it was overheating so I pulled over, noticed the coolant was low, and topped it off. I changed the thermostat myself, and it seemed OK. I was able to drive it 250+ miles in one day with 4 of us in the car with no problems.

Then one day after I'd driven around for a good 120 miles, I stopped to do some window shopping about 30 miles from home. When I got back on the road, the car started getting hot, so I got off at the next exit. I happened to be there when a car show was going on, so I parked the car and walked around taking pictures for almost an hour. It was a hot day though, with temperatures in the 90's, so letting the car rest didn't help. I topped off the coolant with the last of what I had, and got back on the road, but it overheated again. This time I had to drive it like that a little further to find some shade to park in. When I popped the hood it was steaming like crazy, the coolant reservoir had started melting and the coolant vapor had made a hole in it. Eventually I got some more coolant in it and drove the rest of the way home.

Anyway, I got that reservoir replaced with a cheap one from ebay and took it to a mechanic my cousin suggested. It turned out to be the radiator fan that wasn't working, so even though everything was flowing fine the fan wouldn't turn on to dissipate the heat. I had suspected that could be a cause, but would have had to cross some wires to find out. While he was at it he changed the water pump and timing belt and a few other belts and it's been fine for the 30k miles since.

One more thing to note: I believe on these cars the temperature "gauge" isn't really a gauge, it's actually only holds two positions. If the car is fine the needle is level, otherwise it shoots up to the max and the light turns on. That makes it harder to diagnose since you can't tell if the car is "getting" hot or how hot it's gotten.

This makes me think that the problem was actually the water pump. If you're driving on the freeway, the fan isn't really needed--the speed of the car allows plenty of air flow through the radiator. The fan is really only needed at idle.