Lately my car had symptoms indicating that the coolant seals where going bad. The pressure in the cooling system got way to high and the coolant was pushed out of the overflow tank. After 40-50 miles or so there was to little coolant left to cool the engine and it would overheat. Ofcourse I got only suprised by this once, and I refilled it right away with the engine still running. (got a bad burn on my arms from that!) after that I filled up before the engine could overheat.

I can't afford a rebuild so I dicided to try a the copper block weld stuff. Step 1 of this fix is the clean the cooling system.

Last saturday I flushed the cooling system, drained the old coolant (it had a cheap seeling compound in it which didn't work), put a gardenhose in the radiator and flushed it with water for some time. Did the same with the engine (put the hose in the filler neck, the thermostat is removed). Re-installed the drainplug and -bolt, filled the system with water and some radiotor cleaning stuff. The directions said to drive for 30 miles with this mixture of water and cleaning stuff but because of dense traffic I drove about 60 miles. When I got home I checked the system (as I did a few times at gasstations on the highway) and to my suprise it was totally full. The overflow tank was just in between the low and the full mark. (it was little above low when the engine was still cold)

I refilled with fresh coolant (green!) and on sunday I drove about 150 miles (with frequent redlines). After that the system was still full, but now the overflow tank was a little above the full mark. Still bad is that after cooling down the coolant doesn't go back in the engine so there is still something wrong.

I'm gonna re-install the thermostat (new) soon and see what will happen....

Marco.

 

So were you driving around without a thermostat? That may cause some strange coolant activities. I would put the thermo back in a give us another update.

 

No thermostat is extremely bad. The thermostat in these cars are the blockoff type, which means that when they open, they actually alter the flow path of the coolant through the system. If you don't have one in place, there's nothing to force the coolant to flow through the radiator some may circulate through, but most of it will continue to flow around the block, as if the t-stat was closed....result...overheating.