Hey again everyone, I am pretty sure my motor has bad water seals, but I wanted to get a few more informed opinions before I go ripping my engine apart again.

I got this motor used from someone, it had good compression. I put it in the car, and it runs great, only problem was that when it got hot, it would be hard to start.

Started getting worse and worse because this weekend, I took it to a drift event. After the first run, the temp gauge was at about 3/4 probably, I have never had the gauge go over 1/2 before when running normally. I thought probably just because I'm drifting lol. After next run it gets super freaking hot. I open the hood, and I feel the upper radiator hose, and it's SUPER swollen. There is a lot of air trapped in the cooling system.

So the day goes on and I'm desperately trying everything to cool my engine down and get it running normally so that I can get more runs in, but nothing works, I get all the air out I can and fill it to the brim with water, there seems to be more air getting into it somehow. I never had this problem before, and the only thing that I changed since it started happening was the engine. So bad water seals is my verdict. Confirmation? haha thanks,

Brad

 

you mean coolant seals right?

let your car sit over night and get stone cold.. i believe this is called the champagne test??

1: take the radiator cap off
2: start the car
3: check for a steady flow/stream of bubbly champagne like activity in the radiator.

if you see bubbly/champagne like coolant, that is a "Bad Sign" and the coolant seals are likely going.. if not, then the opposite may be true

 

yes coolant seals. I will try the champagne test in the morning, thanks.

 

other obvious signs would be disappearing coolant, and if your exhaust smells sweet.. just something else you could check

 

I started this video about 30-60 seconds into starting my car.

IMG 2051 - YouTube

Definitely not a stream of bubbles, but lots of bubble action going on. Normal or bad?

 

Any thoughts?

 

well from what i know, bad results from a champagne test include small carbonated water like bubbles..

smell your exhaust.. if it smells sweet = bad sign..

this could be some kind of leak in the coolant system, that or maybe you didn't bleed the system correctly the last time you filled up..

IIRC failing to bleed the system could have been the cause of the high temp gauge readings, since the air will be hotter than the water.. it will also (IIRC) cause little funky quirky **** to happen as you described..

hopefully this is something stupid like a small leak.. try searching some other **** like "coolant bubbles" or "coolant leak" and random **** like that, maybe you'll find something

 

Thanks for the advice. A couple other updates, I just went out there and did it one more time. If i gave it a little bit of throttle, the coolant level would actually go down just a bit, and I would have to put more in to bring it back up to the top so I could look for bubbles. Like I said before, it's really hard to start, which could also be a flooding problem I understand.

I smelled the exhaust...It's hard to describe a smell and I've never smelled an exhaust that I was sure had coolant seal problems, I guess it smells a little sweet.



Should the coolant level go down when I give it throttle? Is that normal, or a concern?

 

Easiest way is to go to napa and get a head gasket test kit ($40). it uses a chemical die that changes from blue to yellow if there are exhaust gasses present in your coolant.

 

The coolant will appear to disappear as it gets sucked through the coolant system, so that's normal.. well as long as it rises back up, and doesn't disappear permanently hahaha

It sounds like your coolant seals may be going.. is there any smoke coming from the exhaust? That's also one of those "no ****" obvious kinda things

Maybe you should bleed your collant system, and let it cool down all the way, and then try again.. cap up the radiator, and take out the bleed screw start the car let the system relieve its self.. also the car will probably have to be at operating temperature since the thermostat(assuming you are using one) will not open until it is.. do that, but make sure the car doesn't get TOO hot(duh) hah

I'm not an expert though, all these things I've been saying are things I've learned on the forum..

searching never seems to help me with any of my problems, but I do pick up little **** like this.. maybe you'd have more luck

 

I think I am going to go buy this tomorrow morning and try and remove all the air from the system.

NAPA AUTO PARTS

I don't have a bleeder screw or anything of that nature on my car, so it's difficult to get all the air out. If that's the only problem with it, then there has to be a ton of air in the system. The people on this forum that have used it love it, so I might as well give it a shot.

If I can top it off with this thing, and am losing coolant, then I'll have an answer.

 

Deff seals the air is compression coming out of the engine in most cases the resivor bottle will blow the lid off.

 

yeah, and even after I topped the radiator off when I was at the track, the upper radiator hose got super swollen like there was constantly more air getting pushed into it. I thought maybe there was just air trapped in the system. and kept getting pushed to the top slowly...but I don't think there could be THAT much after topping it off.

 

Some more updates on this. I bought the no-spill coolant funnel system, it works great btw. Filled it up, the car started and there was some bubbling again. I noticed, though, that this bubbling is different than "champagne" like fizz-bubbles that I've seen before and idk if that's why it's called the champagne test or if just means bubbles in general... ANYWAYS so it was bubbling, and I pushed the throttle open a few times and it would bubble right after on that. I thought for sure the water seals were bad... I took the funnel off and put the rad cap back on. I then started it again and let it idle for a while to see if it got hot, it seemed to be fine, I was revving it up to redline and it stayed at about 45% on the temp gauge. There was also no smoke up until i started revving it like that, and when I did, it wasn't at all a smokeout, just a little bit of white smoke. I'm gonna check it tonight when I get home from work after it's cooled, see if the water is low or not. Tomorrow I'll take it for a drive. It's hard to tell when the water is full because the water seals aren't so bad that the coolant goes into the engine instantly, it took a drift event for it to get to the point where it started overheating, so it's a hard judgement to make. Hopefully after a good long drive tomorrow it'll either be good or it'll suck all the water in so I have a definite answer.

 

Overheating. Bad seals. Sorry man. Rebuild time

 

I would say that more often than not engines come quite okay from overheating. There are those unlucky of course.

Check all hoses for leaks, if that means pulling your dash to check the heater, so be it.

What you can do is drain the coolant and put air (pressure pump) in it, and listen. Well, take out the plugs first, maybe even the whole intake manifold. If water leaks that way, it should be substantial enough to get a hissing sound with enough air pressure (without me saying anything about what pressure level you should try, don't know what pressure the cooling system operates with).

This is basically the same test as the intake vac leak test, except no smoke or soap.

Also, when my head gasket went on my old Passat, as well as my friends AE86, you could definitely smell the exhaust fumes in the coolant, even though there was no really noticable smell on the exhaust (Sweet smelling alcohol stuff you know :P ).

Now, for the air test on the coolant system, I would block off the heater, just in case. If I'm not mistaken it is weaker than all other parts in the system, and too much pressure could blow it, and that is a bitch to replace. If there is NO hissing sound from the engine under pressure, it could be any hose around the engine that contains coolant. Then you'd want to check the heater. Unless I'm mistaken and it can get the same amount of **** without going bad.

One thing that I got was the o-rings in the lower intake manifold to the block. Dripped down on the turbo, into the intake, everywhere. So I got symptoms of a coolant seal, but the tell-tale thing was the turbo smelling.. well, drunk.

 

usually you'll hear gurgling when you first start your car in the morning telling you coolant is missing.

the bubble test is seen when your car heats up and the thermostat opens. otherwise you're just seeing the air bubbles escaping from when you filled the tank up.

burp the system and make sure you run the heater at full blast to circulate all the coolant.

you gotta have a full radiator shroud and those two plastic ducts on the other side. the last components are the bottom scrape shield and the foam that sits between the oil cooler and the radiator. people end up missing one or more of these and this is where their overheating problems originate. overheating over time will kill the seals. one real bad overheat (metal warping) and the seal will be toast the first time. you hear that coolant buzzer then immediately shut of the engine. that buzzer is the same for oil level.