Yesterday, for no reason, my car overheated. I was driving home from a trip to Breed & Co. hardware, looking for parts to rewire an antique light fixture, when I noticed the A/C compressor was misbehaving—one minute it blew cold air, the next hot, the next cold again. I switched off the compressor and rolled down the front windows, and a couple of minutes later noticed an odd smell that I identified as glycol coolant. That’s when I noticed my temperature gauge was pegged on “H,” so I pulled into a handy parking lot (Central Park, in front of Bookstop) and shut down the car. Once I opened the hood, I could see and hear steam escaping from the radiator overflow reservoir, so I wasn’t about to try meddling with it. I called AAA for a tow, and when they told me it would be an hour and a half before the truck could get to me, I decided what the hell, I might as well have lunch. So I went into Bookstop and bought a book to read over lunch (Gaiman and Pratchett’s Good Omens), and walked up the shopping center to Central Market Café. (Memo: bacon-and-gorgonzola pizza was not an inspired idea; the gorgonzola overwhelms the bacon and everything else.)
Just as I finished lunch and walked out of the cafe, I saw the tow truck pulling up, so I flagged him down, he hitched the car up and towed it to my garage which is, fortunately, only a couple of miles from where I broke down. I settled myself to wait and find out what the damage was, and how much it was going to cost.
They couldn’t find anything wrong. The guy who worked on it said he put about a pint of water in the radiator, started it up, ran it for an hour, and couldn’t make it run hotter than 180 (normal operating temperature), even with the A/C running full-bore. His guesses at what happened were either (1) the radiator fan stuck ‘off’ (like “stiction” in the old Macintosh hard drives), (2) the thermostat stuck closed, or (3) the radiator core is partially blocked. He did discover one small radiator leak that I’ll have to keep an eye on until I can get the radiator pulled and fixed, but it wasn’t large enough a leak to explain what happened. I’ll have them look at it again on Monday, when I’m supposed to take the car in anyhow to have the back brakes replaced. In the meantime, I took the car this afternoon to have the cooling system flushed and refilled, on general principles.
I also bagged a consulting job while I was waiting. The garage owner and I got to talking about computers and he told me he’d been having buffer underrun problems with his CD-RW. I told him if he liked, I’d come take a look at it, and charge by results: if I fixed it, he could pay me, and if not I wouldn’t bill him. He was so pleased at the notion that he didn’t charge me for trying to find the radiator problem, which I thought nice of him.
