Re: Overheating-Case study

Posted by BigKev On 2017/2/24 8:28:13

I had a similar problem with a daily driver about 10 years ago. It would run fine for a week or so, even in heavy traffic, and then start to overheat. When it did this, the radiator coolant level has always found to be low, but the expansion tank was full to very top. So, I would pour the fluid from the expansion tank back into the radiator and it would fill the radiator perfectly, and the problem would go away....for about another week or so.

After a few months, the problem got progressively worse, with the time between having to refill getting shorter. I had changed the cap twice thinking it was that, and even put on a higher PSI cap.

Long story short, it had a bad head gasket that was leaking cylinder pressure gas into the coolant. This extra pressure caused the coolant to blow past the cap, and once enough coolant was expelled, it started to overheat.

Looking back, I believe it was caused by a shard of wood that I found stuck through the radiator about a month before all this started to happened, and had caused the car to severely overheat. The radiator was changed, and I thought all was fine. But the damage to head gasket had happened and it slowly got worse over the next few months.