G'day all. On Bruce's posting below, I had an Alfetta GT that used to do the same thing. It nearly caused me a cooked engine because I'd routinely check the coolant reservoir level and it was never low, so I never looked under the radiator cap itself. However, unknown to me the coolant was gradually migrating from the rad to the bottle during each engine heating cycle, and one day I saw the temp gauge starting to rise too high... I stopped and looked at the bottle and found the level was fine there so drove on a little... but the gauge got too high to continue so then I finally thought about looking into the rad, and indeed it had lost a lot of water. Anyway I added some water (very slowly) and got home safely.
On investigating, found no cooling system leaks under pressure-test, no water in the oil etc, and finally found a crook seal or some such in the fancy rad cap, such that it had an air leak and the vacuum created as the engine cooled just sucked air back into the rad instead of drawing back the coolant-overflow. A new cap (of the right type) fixed us up. Lucky escape! Best regards, Graham Hilder, NZ (1750 GTV, 156, Alfasud x3). >>>>>>>>>> Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 19:47:41 -0400 From: Bruce Giller <[email protected]> Subject: [alfa] Re: alfa-digest V10 #2726 Jamie, On both my '73 GTV and '86 Spider, the coolant overflow tank operated only one direction; coolant went in but did not go out. The coolant was never sucked back into radiator after the coolant cooled down. And the overflow containers had Mix-Max markings which I have found pretty meaningless. <<<<<<<<<< -- to be removed from alfa, see http://www.digest.net/bin/digest-subs.cgi or email "unsubscribe alfa" to [email protected]
