I am having some serious coolant issues...

My truck has been running fine and very cool (almost TOO cool), but the other day, I noticed some coolant dripping off of the radiator and it was bubbling a little on one side of the radiator from what looked like a small crack. I ran and got some radiator stop leak and tried that. The radiator was still too full to accept the bottle of stop leak, so I drained a little coolant from the radiator. I poured the stop leak in and ran the motor for a while like the directions said, and the leak seemed to have stopped.

Then, all the sudden, I am getting a strong leak out of the back side of the engine (not sure of the origin, since I didn't have a flashlight) It could be coming from the firewall, I couldn't tell, but it runs down the block and drips down from there. It produces a pretty big puddle, though.

A couple more things I noticed was that when I turned on the heater, just cold air comes out, but the temp gauge goes up to the L in NORMAL on the temp guage (what kind of temp guage doesn't have numbers on it?!?!?!?!) so that tells me it got kinda warm.

First thing I thought of was that it had an air bubble in the coolant system and it couldn't work it out, so it found a way to releive the pressure though a loose fitting somewhere. I pulled the radiator cap and noticed that the seal on it was torn a bit, but I would have figured that would have releived the pressure.


Any ideas? I'm going to get a new radiator cap just in case. The first thing I thought if was that perhaps the coolant mixture was too watery and it froze the block and cracked a water jacket, but the coolant looks pretty green and it hasn't been THAT cold prior.

Matt (hoping I didn't just cause more troubles than I fixed)

 

First of all stop leak should only be used to get you out of the bush, or directly to a repair facility, it is by no means a permanent fix. Once the leak is fixed it is very important to flush all of that stuff out.

It sounds like your main problem is a coolant leak at the back of the block. The possibilites are many, rusted frost plug, leaking head gasket, leaking intake gasket, leaking hoses, leaking heater core.

I have seen radiator stop leak plug up already bad rads, and heater cores. If I were you I would fix the leaks first and then chase the other issues. Good luck!

Nick from the frozen north
1974 F-250 4X4
soon to be 429
dana 60 front and rear

 

Is the water pump actually moving any coolant?

 

>Is the water pump actually moving any coolant?


I haven't really checked. I figure this weekend I'll pull the rad cap and have a look. I just haven't had the time to check it out thoroughly yet.

I'm kind of wondering if since I had to release some of the coolant via the drain at the bottom, I introduced air in the system and it's just trapped, since the rad cap isn't doing it's job right.

I'm going to pull the rad cap off and see if the fluid is moving. If it is, that would indicate the water pump is working right, but maybe the rad cap isn't. Then, I'll replace it (was going to anyway) and see what that does.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

Matt