Thick Black Oil in Coolant Overflow Tank

[ejsharp]

My 1987 300E quit on me just as I was approaching our driveway. It suddenly started losing power and then stopped running.

I did some preliminary cheking and found that there is a thick layer of black oil at least an inch deep inside the expansion tank of the cooling system.

I pulled all 6 plugs and they are uniformly the same... yet odd in that each plug looks like the dark and light side of the moon. One side of the plugs are black and the opposite side white.

I tried to restart the engine and it kind of belched white smoke out of the air breather. At another time it seemed to sputter on about two cylinders.

I suspect a blown head gasget but there is no reason that I am aware of that could have caused the gasget to blow.

There appears to be no water in the oil. The crank oil appears normal and very clean while the oil in the expansion tank is thick and black.

Any insights will be greatly appriciated. I've only been operating the car for a few months so I don't know it's history. It has about 230,000 miles on it.

Smiles.