I'm curious, and would appreciate any extra input on the following problem:

1989 GTUs, 150k miles, original engine(pulls REAL strong), with leaking oil cooler lines. About a few drops a night, nothing serious. Car survives 1200 mile road trip from point of purchase to current residence. Yesterday, on the way to my gf's place, add coolant buzzer starts shrieking, engine temps normal. The temp outside is nothing special, wasn't driving it hard or anything, it just went off. About 1 minute later, engine temps near redline, so I shut it down, coast it the rest of the way. Upon popping the hood, the coolant resevoir is empty, and there's a steady stream of oil leaking downhill from under the car. I refill the resevoir, water leaks out next to the oil(but I think it was just overflow) and I leave the car be. The next morning I come out to check up on it, expecting both the oil pan and the coolant resevoir to be empty. Instead, they are both full! Car starts and idles fine, rock solid. What's the deal here? I'm in San Francisco right now with no tools, so I can't get at anything, there's some gummy crap around inside the coolant cap(probably from running the radiator dry). Anyone want to hazard a guess what happened? Did my oil cooler line finally blow off? Why did coolant flush? Thanks guys, I'm interested to hear what you all think. Peace!

Steve

 

If you blew one of your OC lines, there would be oil spray all over your rad and the front of the engine.

Aside from that, the story is weird as hell

 

did you overfill the two liquids?

If your oil cooler lines are leaking you should just replace them with some corksport oil lines ($140 est.). The hole may get bigger and you may be stuck on the side of the road with a huge oil leak coming from your hoses (cuz that **** happened to me hahaha). Its not that hard to do also, just took me a couple of hours or like 2 or 3

 

Agreed. Glad I'm not the only one confused! I forgot to mention that despite the coolant resevoir being full, the add coolant buzzer still goes off about 3-4 seconds after having started the car. Any other takes? Thanks guys!

Steve

P.S. I'm pretty sure I overfilled the coolant resevoir, and that's why it spilled, I didn't touch the oil, but it's possible the previous owner overfilled before he handed it over. But why would the radiator have ran dry? I'm more concerned about that.

 

I just topped off the coolant from the radiator cap, it took about 3 quarts or so(1.5 stove pots of tapwater), and restarted it. Coolant buzzer went off again. I topped off the resevoir again after that(about 3/4 of a cup was gone from where I topped it off) and checked the oil again. The oil is down 1/3 of a quart from where it was this morning. Wierd. I restarted it a couple of more times adding water all the while to try and "burp" the radiator, in case there was an air bubble. I think it's drinking coolant, I can hear a "draining" sound coming from the area around the oil filter each time I shut the engine down. It also appears that there "might" be water in the oil, i can't tell. I'm thoroughly confused now, ust thought I'd add this...

Steve