James, Looks like just you and I around here tonight.
Water overflow leaking - you mean full to the brim and out it's overflow. If so this sounds like blown head gasket to me - and you don't necessarily have to get oil & water mixed to have a blown head gasket. There's a couple of ways to check for a blown head gasket. A CO2 sniffer is the fail safe way, most radiator workshops will have one. Another sign is very fast pressure build up in the radiator and a constant stream of bubbles especially when blipping the throttle. A breach in the gasket between a water passage and the cylinder is the most common area a head gasket will fail. Compression pressure in the cooling system causes a few things to happen - you get close to even pressure either side of the water pump which means the water flow stops or reduces quite a bit - that leads to no heat exchange via the radiator. Then there's the radiator cap, a new one on a 1600 is rated at 13 psi or 90ish kpa. If the pressure in the radiator gets to that level then the cap lets it escape and takes a fair amount of water with it - straight into the overflow bottle. This event can even be quite violent, to the point were the cap can stop it until the pressure drops considerably below 13 psi. Now you have another problem i.e. a vastly reduced amount of water in the radiator which then leads to overheating. You can see from this that this sort of head gasket breach escalates to a critical situation very quickly. If you ever get stuck in the bush with this sort of problem you can do a couple of things to slow up the loss of water. Remove the thermostat to allow more circulation, run the heater on full open, run the radiator cap on the first stage to allow the pressure to escape gradually from the cooling system and carry a quantity of water and check the level as soon as the gauge starts to rise. I drove a car many years ago that blew a gasket on the way to holidays, i.e. trailer and family onboard and it even survived the drive home over the Clyde mountain in the cool of the evening and I only had to top up the water after the climb at Braidwood. Oil in water usually indicates a far serious condition i.e. cracked head. regards Terry -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of James Morrison Sent: Friday, 12 July 2002 8:31 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: water probs okay i just organised the starter motor when i was reminded of another problem and they want it fixed. I started it up and took it for a drive (1600 with an L20B) prolly 3 minutes of driving and about the same warm up time, plus a 25 min drive to my house yesterday, and bam the radiator is empty and she's over heated. Couldnt see any signs of leakin from hoses, but the overflow bottle was leaking water. it runs standard engine fan and has been doing it for a while apparently. I said it could be thermostat, and at worst head gasket. i will be checkin the oil tomorrow but its not blowing any crazy amount of smoke and it seems to be running okay. Any ideas?? James _____________________________________________________________ Get Your free Ozdat Email Account ---> http://www.ozdat.com _____________________________________________________________ Promote your group and strengthen ties to your members with [EMAIL PROTECTED] by Everyone.net http://www.everyone.net/?btn=tag --membersozdat------------------------------------------------------- OZDAT Mailing List Please Note:- Send (un)subscribe requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send submissions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] No unauthorised redistribution of this email http://www.ozdat.com/ozdatonline/index.htm http://www.ozdat.com/ozdatonline/listindex.html http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------
