Ok, so I have been reading about blown head gaskets and I believe that may be my problem, but I was hoping for some additional opinions, as there are a couple of things that don’t make sense. So here is the story:

The Truck began to put out small puffs of white smoke on start up, and on Sunday the smoke became heavy. It appears to smoke most heavily when at idle and when you first begin to move after sitting idle (even for as little as 10 seconds). There is Bubbling in the coolant overflow tank. Because I was concerned about overheating, I put the heaters on full blast, but as soon as you come to a stop the air coming out of the heater vents goes cold, but heats up again as soon as you begin moving again. I checked and there is no coolant in the oil. At one point on my trip home, the heat began to rise quickly so I pulled over and found the host connecting the radiator to the engine soft and the coolant tank empty so I added coolant to the reservoir and restarted the truck. I was able to drive the next 20+ miles home at 45mph and the heater on with no problems except the heavy smoking at stops.

Any suggestions as to how to approach this and what the problem might be?
Thanks for any help.

PS: the truck is a 95 6.5TD Suburban with 185k on the clock

If you have bubbling in the overflow tank, you definatelly have a leak from the combustion chamber to the coolant sysem. It can be head gaskets, heads or even the block. I would vote for getting a adapter that fits your glow plug hole and hooking it up to a air compressor. the one that produces your bubbling is the cylinder that is bad. If you pull the heads, Have a machine shop check the heads and also when you pull the heads you will be able to tell if it was the head gasket(usually) If neither of them are the culprit then you need to check the piston bore on you affected cylinder. There were some nice home type magnafluxing ideas posted awhile ago, useing brake cleaner, and baby powder, someone else is sure to know exactly how it was done.

Take the belt off and take the thermostat housing off and remove the thermostat. Add water if needed to bring the level up to where the thermostat was.

Crank the engine and look and see which side the bubbles come from. That side is bad.

DavidPhillips,
Should I turn the motor by hand or just bump the starter?