A friend of mine who's in the service asked me to do a little work on his car as he said its running warm. So i take the car home at 1:30 am and realize that 2 of the 3 of the dash lights are blown so I use the cell phone to keep an eye on it. And sure as can be, when driving the temp gauge goes to 3/4 the way up and goes back down. Before I left his dads house I checked the oil, which was clean and the coolant which was at the proper level. Yesterday at school, i opened the radiator cap and low and behold someone had filled it up with straight unmixed antifreeze...
I drained it today and refilled with distilled water and water wetter and its still doing the same. The next will be a thermostat and gasket but neither are onhand here at any of th parts houses. Any Ideas? Maybe a sending unit, ??? I really don't think its really overheating, as the fans work normally and there isn't any boiling or steam anywhere. Let me know what you think.
If someone replaced the coolant I would wonder if they purged the air from the cooling system after. I have no idea how to do that on an Evo8. I'd research it on the Evo 8 forums.
Obviously on a boosted car you need to worry about head gasket. No idea if that is a problem with EVOs.
+1 on what Xceler8x said, I have seen that behavior on a number of cars that had air in the system.
fixed with distilled H20, a radiator flush , water wetter, and a new thermostat.
I have a feeling (and by a feeling I mean I'm somewhere around 99% sure) that it was just air in the system as the above people mentioned.
Flushing the system probably got it out... and I doubt it needed distilled the flush and water wetter.
Just make sure you remember to put mix back in it before it starts freezing.
How do you usually purge a system of air? Im having similar problems.
The easy way to do it is run the vehical with the rad cap off but on some cars this will not get all of the air out. You will have to find out the procedure for your particular car.
On the civic I used to have there was a bleed screw that you loosened and ran the car until there were no ore bubbles coming out.
Hope this helps.
yeah most imports have a bleed screw somewhere towards the top/back of the engine, generally.
Hmmm my 3000GT vr4 doesnt. ill have to ask on 3si. Although i think running it with the rad cap off would work. The rad cap is at the highest point in the system.
yeah it usually is but that doesn't mean its a straight shot from the back of the block to the radiator cap and its common to get bubbles in there. Some people think jacking up the front of the car helps; some people say you can "tap" on the engine to help the air bubbles out.
the FSM should have the proper instructions for bleeding the system as the factory intended for your vehicle.
