Get a Lisle funnel or similar.. It's a large funnel with adapters and caps so that you can firmly seal the funnel to the filler location. You fill the funnel with some Coolant, and as the system burps the air out, the Coolant in the funnel acts as a check valve. It also means that with the expansion of the Coolant, it won't spill all over your engine. Using this funnel will allow you to get all the air out with no guesswork.

If after you've burped it for some time you're still getting bubbles, then the air is getting in somewhere....

The small bubbles / champagne bubbles *can* be normal in the sense that the water pump impeller can cause cavitation from running at a high rpm. That being said, any normal sized bubbles become champagne when they hit the waterpump.. Sometimes it's best to shut the engine off after you've burped it for some time and allow everything to settle and for those smaller bubbles to become a few normal sized ones again. Squeezing hoses throughout the whole process is important.

Not that you want to hear this, but my last engine suffered a Coolant seal failure. I would only get champagne -like bubbles after it began to warm up, but not when cold. Mine never overheated from this failure, but it did overcool..weirdly.

Sorry for the flood of run on sentences, I'm at work.

 

i got an idea about the bubble test: don't worry about it.

you only should worry about such things if you are having cooling system issues already slapping you in the face.

 

Thanks!

When I replaced the coolant, I noticed that I thought it only took about 5 quarts. According to the manual, it should take 7.7 quarts. So I am guessing the burping is because of air locks still in there. Everytime I shut it off and let it cool down, I have to add a little. As long as I dont go past the 7.7 quarts everything should be fine.

 

Was the heater valve fully open when you bled the system?

 

and did you drain the engine block too or just the radiator?

2 gallons is the capacity of a completely empty system.

 

Ok. I am big dummy. I drain just the radiator and flushed. I see now here is a place to drain on the engine block. Looks like I need to redo to flush and refill.