Hey Tess! Great to see your name cropping up after too long an absence. Are you still driving the Panzer wagon or have you seen the light and moved back to Alfas? :-) Whatever, it's good to see that you're still around and toying with car things. The digest has thinned out somewhat but your question sure did bring some of the contributors from the early days, out of the woodwork. Wonder where the king of spelling improvisation Doug Sedon is? I'm still a GTV fanatic but have a 2004 Alfa GT 3.2 V6 as a daily driver - it's a blast.
Cooling in early cars such as the 1928 Rugby I bought for $65 while a student in the late 60s, had a radiator with a cap right at the top so it could be accessed without lifting the hood. That was just filled with water but in these parts one always added something like Bar's Leaks or Repco irontite Sealer to prevent what else but leaks, and to keep temperatures down. In all the time I had with that car, it didn't overheat once. That car was manufactured by Durant (later GM) and was right hand drive. I used to see cars chucking out boiling water and steam quite regularly and if someone was crazy enough to open take the radiator cap off, there'd be a mass of scalding steam and hot water erupting. It was no secret that you either waited till the thing cooled down to open the radiator cap or if in a hurry, used a substantial rag or towel folded many times to cover the cap so the hot fluids didn't go everywhere.Yes, people did get hot water over themselves. In the sealed systems we have now this is a rare occurrence but can happen for example when the fan v-belt breaks or flies off because someone is experimenting on a racetrack running without an alternator to keep the belt tensioned. Ask me how I know! (The first sealed cooling system I had experience with was in my first Alfa, a 1969 1750 GT Veloce. Before that all the cars I came across had "open" systems with an overflow pipe that exited from the filler neck to somewhere alongside the radiator so expansion was taken care of by simply losing water onto the road so pressure did not build up. I believe that some cars had an expansion bottle from which the coolant would be sucked back into the system.) Regards Tess and ciao tutti! Les in Wellington, New Zealand -- to be removed from alfa, see http://www.digest.net/bin/digest-subs.cgi or email "unsubscribe alfa" to [email protected]
