Radiator Update

[Jim Stoltz]

Got a call from the radiator shop today. He was concerned because the new core was 1/4" thicker than the original. Since I have plenty of clearance between the fan and radiator I told him that wasn't an issue.

He then went on to say "I think you should also know that the original radiator had a baseball-sized chunk of rusty mud stuck in the inlet." This is not a good thing. If you recall, the "new" engine had sat in storage for quite some time. It wasn't until I got it home that I realized that there was some water in it, and a lot of rust. I turned it upside down and ran water at city-water pressure through the water pump jackets to rinse it out. I did this until things looked fairly clean. Apparently not clean enough.

So the guy suggests that I pop out the block drains (he's not 100% if the big block has them, nor am I) and the freeze plugs to see what's going on in there. I don't want to plug up a new, $720 radiator with sludge. I'll be looking for "block cleaning" suggestions on the web and welcome anything anyone can recommend in that regard.

[Jimco_W001]

Jim, I would flush it out with the city water again.Then when its all together run some cleaner and water in it.

Flush it out and use distilled water and antifreeze.You should be fine.

[Jim Stoltz]

Thanks. I'm hoping the past year or so of heat cycling has dislodged most of the gunk. Unfortunately it clogged the radiator, but there may not be much more.

I'll flush it again and look into a coolant filter.

[Russell E Johnson]

never heard of a coolant filter system before, can you get them for any engine?

[Jim Stoltz]

What I'm finding is that they're mostly for diesels. More research required.... :)

[Lakota Wolf]

Some diesels have a screen filter at the inlet and lower port of the radiator.

[Rich Thomas]

Greeting Jim, I had a situation happen to me this past weekend that made me think of you and your heat problems. I've kept abreast of your progress and am aware of the gunk found in your radiator and I'm on a short rope as I wright this so I'm not going to back track the thread to see if this has already been addressed so please disregard if it has. I took an impromptu trip this weekend and decided to pull my popup instead of taking the motor home simply because it was already to go and the Palace was not. here is my story. So I hook up the pop and head off on a 150 mile trek to Indian Lake Ohio; the two and a half hour trip was totally uneventful. on day two ran all over the area checking it out and drove an additional 100 miles to the north to trek around Grand lake st marry's still nothing to really alert me to what was about to take place. On Monday I drove quite a bit and on occasion I was getting intermittent warning light for low coolant. This didn't alarm me in the least because it had happened before and Most of the time it was bogus but twice before in the three to five years I've owned this truck I did put coolant in the reservoir; usually a very small amount. Sorry this is lengthy but here is where i felt our situation to be at least a little bit parallel. I had been out running around Indian lake most of the morning and then drove to my sons house about 20 or so miles away. I was there to help him look at a house he was considering for purchase the whole pretense of my trip. so the decision to use my truck to venture of on the house quest was made and off we went. about 10 miles into a 30 mile trip my dash lights up and an alert sounds along with a now flashing yellow light low coolant level. my temp gauge now pegged at 260 deg. well I got to a station by running my heater full blast and got out to check. No leaks full reservoir and the engine did not feel overly hot to me so we walked over to the house done an inspection and returned to the truck and it was now cool at the normal 196 deg. I foolishly felt it to be a bad sending unit and we loaded up and headed back to my sons house. Five min. into the trip the temp gauge wet to 210 then took a giant leap to 260 again. well we was way out in the sticks and about 12 miles from my other sons house  so on went the heater and we continued down the road. long story short the impeller on the water pump was slipping on the shaft and even thought we had minimal flow it wasn't enough to cool my truck had it not been for the heater fan I am confident I would have warped a head or some other catastrophic failure. My theory is every time I got that warning light the pump had been slipping and the hotter the engine the more it slipped. any way if you haven't yet you may want to check your water pump just for grins and giggles it may be why you never blew that gunk out of your radiator. feel free to disregard this and / or delete it if you feel it not reflective of your situation and again sorry it is so long.

 

[Jim Stoltz]

Thanks for the insight Rich. It was my heater that saved me, too, on the way home from my last trip. I was hoping that temp gauge was wrong but it wasn't. When I turned on the heater it had a visible impact on the coolant temp. I hate to think about how hot it actually got. But that's water under the bridge now.

My water pump is new (though that doesn't mean it isn't bad), but I'm pretty sure my problem was a near-complete lack of flow through the radiator because of the rusty sludge that was in the used engine. With hindsight being 20/20, I should have made a better attempt to clean it out before installing it. But, I assume it's the original, 30-year-old radiator so it may have been due anyway.

[Rich Thomas]

The hot air from the heater actually made the little louvers in my dash vents drupe and fall out. Now I have a jigsaw puzzle of little plastic flaps to heat up flatten out and put back in. but I feel I did no damage to the engine. I pulled the pop up back home today and the temp never went over 200 degrees and had no other issues. I count my self lucky.

[Jim Stoltz]

I don't know how hot my heat was, but it was crazy. Even with the fan off, the heat coming from the dash was insane. I had both rooftop A/Cs going full blast and the cab was like a sauna. No one would sit up there with me! I slid it to "COLD" a couple of times (shut the water off to the core) just for a bit of relief. It did keep the temp just under the red most of the time though. It pegged the gauge twice briefly on hill climbs but improved a bit on the downhill sides. It never did recover and settle just below center like it used to - and now I know why.

[Rich Thomas]

It's definitely good to resolve issues. especially ones like these.   

[Jim Stoltz]

Well the radiator has been done for over a week, but work is killing me. I took a vacation day on 9/21 to go get it. I'll probably install it on my day off, too.

I can't get the drain plug out of the block. There only appears to be one, on the driver's side. It's a 14mm hex right above the motor mount. I can only get an open-end/box wrench on it and it's going to round off. No chance of getting a 6-point socket on it.

There's another drain plug directly beneath the fuel filter. It appears to be oil, though. It's rounded off anyway so it's not coming out either. I guess I'll flush it out with some Evap-O-Rust and keep my fingers crossed. 

I've got back-to-back weekend trips coming up in early October so I have to get this thing running again!

In other news, I put Eternabond tape on the roof rack mounts and that fixed the leak that was running into the fridge compartment and down into the entry step. I secured the wobbly ones with bigger screws first, and then put the tape down. That stuff is STICKY. I wasted a fair amount of it when it flopped over on itself and stuck while trying to remove the backing. All in all it went well. I would definitely recommend the stuff.

[Rich Thomas]

Glad you got those water leeks done. I, don't have a good solution to your block drain Jim, other than heat and, I figure you would have done that already if you could get in to it. On the the other drain you could find a nut that is big enough that will fit over the rounded off plug and weld it to the plug. new nut gives you a place for a wrench and the heat from welding it on usually dose the trick to allow it to come loose. That's standard order of operation in the old coal mine to get old rusted in bolts, plugs and studs out of equipment that lives in, on and under water for most of it's useful life. Come to think of it those plugs may have a sealing agent on them like red gasket material that takes a little heat to brake them loose.