I spent some of my Saturday flushing out the radiator and trying to fix a
small coolant leak from the radiator bottom hose. I managed to make the
leak smaller, but still have not fixed it. I think that the leak is
coming from near where the bottom tube connects to the engine bit(don't
know what the part is called).
Anyway all seemed fine and dandy ready for a bank holiday Monday drive...
Come Monday I set off and all was fine except for an odd smell that I put
down to the heaters, until 5 miles down the road I noticed the
temperature guage creeping up above the normal 1/2 way mark. I pulled
over in a convenient bus stop and took a look under the bonnet. I was
not too surprised to find steam pouring out of a badly split heater hose.
I grinned smugly at my forethought to have have bought some heater hose
repair tape after last time one of the hoses split and set about removing
the offending hose from the car. (It was a small U shaped hose towards
the back of the engine on the off side).
Upon inspection I realised that the reason for the particularly large
split was because of a pressure build up behind a large clot of brown
sludgy silt! Now I haven't a clue how it got there, but there was a lot
of it, enough so that the pressure behind wouldn't push it through and
instead burst the tube. Any ideas where this stuff comes from? I can
only think that by cleaning out the radiator dislodged some of this stuff
which got moved through the system until it came to a sharp bend in the
tube and started collecting.
I cleaned the tube out using a combination of a small spanner and a
conveniently discarded wiper blade, found at the side of the road. The
repair went without a hitch and the hole was repaired and the cooling
system topped up again and off we went on our merry way with no further
problems!
As soon as get back off holiday first thing on my shopping list will be
new heater hoses all round!
I'm still not sure where all of the sludgy silt stuff came from though...
cheers
John
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