Piet has always run kinda hot. When I think of a “normal” temperature for a car to run at, I use the Battlewagon as my reference point. She always ran at a hundred and eighty degrees. Piet, ever since I got him, has run with his temp gauge sitting two hundred to two-ten range. Until Wednesday, that is. While I was sitting in downtown rush-hour traffic (no, I wasn’t going to IRS; I was running down to Riverside Drive to conduct a Mensa admission testing session), I noticed the temp needle had climbed up somewhere around two thirty-five. That wasn’t in the redline zone, which doesn’t begin until 255. (Which is silly; damage is going on long before you get to 255, and the gauge pegs at 260.) Still, I figured that crawling along on the freeway downtown wasn’t gonna make things any better, so I got off at 11th Street and cut across East Austin to get to the library, with the gauge wavering between 215 and 230 all the way.
Now Piet just got out of the shop last week from getting his alternator replaced (two hundred thirty-five dollars I don’t have), so I can’t afford to take him back. Besides which, there are usually three things that make an engine overheat: a thermostat that sticks closed, a scaled-up, blocked radiator, and a bad water pump. The first two are things I can do something about, so I am. Tonight I stopped at O’Reilly’s auto parts and bought a thermostat, silicone sealant, a gasket, and a gallon of antifreeze (which, it turned out, I didn’t need, since I already had a gallon and a half in the shed). By the time I got home it was almost dark, so I dug out the drop light, drained off a quart or so of coolant so it wouldn’t flood the area when I pulled the return hose, and started turning wrenches, which required several trips back into the house to find the right-sized sockets. (Note: a two-inch hose clamp takes a five-sixteenths socket, and the water outlet bolts take a thirteen millimeter.)
Removing the hose and outlet was fairly easy; the main problem was working in the cramped area under the air cleaner. I swapped the thermostat, reassembled the unit, filled the radiator back up with coolant and water, started the engine . . . and saw a dribble trickling down the block from under the gasket. I should have figured that I needed to put the blue silicone sealant on both sides of the gasket instead of just the top. Drained off another quart or two, pulled it all back apart (noting that the sealant is now holding the gasket to the outlet just fine), dried off the area, laid down another bead of sealant, reassembled and tightened it all, and restarted the engine before I refilled, just in case I had to pull it all apart again. This time the engine block stayed dry, so I filled the radiator and let the engine run for a little while to see what the temp gauge did.
The results may not be encouraging. When I shut it down, I could see that some water was circulating in the radiator, but the gauge was reading a little bit above 210. That might be because it was sitting at idle, but it might also be that the radiator really is blocked enough that I’m not getting circulation. I could see enough whitish lime-ish buildup on the cross-pipe ends when I looked down the filler cap that it’s possible, and fixing that will mean doing a radiator flush. I don’t want to try doing a flush by myself, because I don’t have any way to corral all the old coolant safely when I drain it, so I think Jiffy Lube gets to do that one. I only hope the problem isn’t the water pump going out. In an engine as old as this one (131,000 miles) I can’t rule that out, and I REALLY, REALLY don’t have the money to replace a water pump, the more so since the Mercury needs a new inner tie rod on the left side. Its steering feels strange and wandering, and Ron warned me that the tie rod needs replacing fairly soon.
