electric relaxation

Actually it was more like DIH, since Dustin did all the work; I mostly just held the flashlight and fetched tools. It should be noted that I think it was incredibly generous of Dustin and Terry to dedicate the better part of their afternoon to the task of helping me get my car running; very few people would be that generous even if they did have the skills (and fewer still actually have said skills).

Anyway, my diagnosis turned out to be spot-on. I hadn’t driven the car in almost six weeks, since it started overheating one night on the way home. When I got it into my garage and popped the hood, I noticed a loud hissing coming from one of the big radiator hoses, and some speckles of radiator fluid, and more coolant pooled up below. So my theory was that the hose had come loose and I lost coolant and coolant pressure. 

Dustin took a look, confirmed my theory, and then when we took the hose off we discovered that the plastic mount on the radiator had cracked and was crumbling. So the hose didn’t really have a good seal, and it had come loose. First we filled up the radiator with some 50/50 antifreeze, and then Dustin reclamped the hose.

The first attempt at a patchwork solution involved using duck tape to get more stable surface area for the hose to clamp on. The battery was dead, so we first had to jump it. That was mildly challenging given the orientation of my car and the layout of my garage, but I had pushed it out by hand far enough that we could get Dustin’s truck close and hook up the cables. 

We jumped the car, and at Dustin’s suggestion I turned on the A/C and we gave it some throttle to try and generate some heat and force the coolant system into action. Once the car had heated up, we saw that the duck tape was actually making the situation worse, since it was so slick that the hose was sliding off it. I killed the engine before the hose could pop off completely, and then we unclamped it. I used an old cookie sheet I had handy to catch all the radiator fluid that then leaked out the bottom. 

We ended up giving up on the tape and just reclamping the hose directly onto what was left of the mount, but moving the clamp itself up as far as it would go. This seems to be working much better. We then ended up pouring in more than half a gallon of radiator fluid; turns out the car was nearly empty, and Dustin’s theory was that there was a huge air bubble that had gotten sucked in due to the empty fluid reservoir and the leaky hoses. 

Eventually the radiator seemed to be holding coolant at the correct pressure (based on Dustin’s estimation), so we called it a day. I left the car running for another half hour, then we took it around the block a few times to make sure it wasn’t likely to suffer a spontaneous dramatic failure.

Anyway, this barely even qualified as a repair job in Dustin’s playbook (I mean, the motherfucker rebuilt an entire engine in four days on a truck he bought for five hundred bucks in New Mexico, just so he could drive it back here before the end of his vacation). But I was very excited. 

I’m probably going to have to buy a new radiator, given that the mount doesn’t seem to be replaceable. The current plan is to just get it delivered to the office, then drive the car over to Dustin’s house in Pacifica and do the installation there.