[TR] Explain This Overheating

[Randall]

---- Dave1massey at cs.com wrote: 
> There was discussion about this on the Wedge list and there were a couple 
> of folks interested and somehow justified the cost.  But I don't know if 
> anyone has tried it yet.

FWIW, I tried something similar many years ago.  Not the same blend as the Evans coolant (which is supposedly a mix of ethylene and propylene glycol), but rather straight ethylene glycol.  As predicted, the engine ran much hotter than usual, so hot in fact that it broke the temperature gauge, but did not boil over.  Seemed like an end to its perpetual overheating problems and it ran really well otherwise.

Until about a year later, when most of #2 cylinder went out the exhaust pipe!  Dad said it looked like a "cloud of engine parts chasing him down the highway".  The high heat (and I later learned lean mixture) had apparently allowed an exhaust valve stem to erode until it broke, letting the valve head loose in the cylinder.  (Poor materials may have played a role as well.)  The valve head broke the piston into bits, then the flailing rod pounded its way through the liner.  The rod didn't break, but wound up bent by 20 or 30 degrees.  The largest piece of piston I found was no bigger than a dime.

For some odd reason, I'm not tempted to repeat the experiment.

Randall