Friday was a good day, or at least started out that way. I got home after work and we had sorted out everything needed to pass a safety inspection, but I was a little worried about the emissions test that cars are required to do in Austin. I drove down to an inspection station close to the house because driving with registration and an inspection that we both around two years out of date made me a little nervous.
The car inspector had trouble starting the car, as you have to give it a certain amount of throttle for it to start, but he managed to get it started and asked “will it idle” ….. “yes, but it will need to warm up a little” He does the driving part of the inspection gets back and does the emission test and to my surprise passed!!! I was very happy to say the least, almost in tears of joy!
Well, confident after having acquired an inspection sticker I decide to take the fox to a happy hour to meet up with some friends.
As I leave the Happy Hour and am getting into the car my jeans rip about 8 inches from my lower back to mid left cheek. Great. I should have taken this omen and gone home, instead I decide that I need to wash some more layers of dirt from the car, that’s when things turned south. Leaving the car wash I noted that the temp gauge was indicating a little above normal and I realized that I had left my Credit Card at Café Mundi, so I head east, only to start overheating, at least according to the gauge. So I pull over, at night, on the east side, in my $250 car. I let it cool down, drive 10 more blocks… rinse and repeat. I finally get within six blocks of the café and after two cops pull someone over right by me, I decided that I would walk the distance to pick up the card.(registration expired in Feb 2007) I set out walking, in my torn jeans, on the eastside at night. I get the card and head back to the car, the cops are still there, so I start the car and ease away. The car quickly gets hot and I find a Chevron to get an ice cream bar and let the car cool off. 20 minutes later I start off again and make it to the Chevron on Congress and Riverside (fairly close to the house). The whole time that I am waiting, I am beginning to understand how bad it would suck to breakdown outside of town, and really hoping that we would find a cheap easy fix to resolve the overheating problem. I get an ice tea and wait 20 min. I finally get the car home and I want to see if I can figure out what was failing. I shoot the hoses with an infrared temp gauge and see 200 – 240 temps, high, but not off the scale. Hmmmm?
[josh] Sorry Chris. There is nothing like standing around East Austin on a Friday night with your rear end hanging out. I had already already left Café Mundi.[/josh]
It turns out that the temp gauge had just decided to break on my inaugural night out with the fox.
The next couple of days we install a $20 aftermarket temp gauge and we are back into the hunt.
Saturday
[Josh] Ok, our new project for Saturday was figuring out why the fox was overheating. Shooting the radiator with the IR thermometer indicated we weren’t as hot as we thought we were. It was still running hot but the dash gage was wrong. Replaced the sensor – still wrong. Tested the sensor – seemed OK, resistance change with temperature. Figured out that the gage cluster must be busted. There was a TSB on the soldering coming loose on the voltage regulator in the gage cluster. Resoldered it onto its flex circuit and it still didn’t work. Eventually, we gave up and installed an aftermarket coolant temp gage and sensor. The up side is we know pretty well what our top tank temps are now. The down side is that we plumbed it into the place where the old sensor was so now the dash gage hi-temp warning light blinks all the time. This could be disconcerting, but we’ve decided to call the flashing red light a “heartbeat” instead of a warning lamp.
So with the new gauge, now we can actually watch it overheat instead of just waiting for steam to come out (!). We did a coolant flush, checked the water pump impeller, and threw out the thermostat just to get max coolant flow through the radiator. We warmed it up to check if that helped. Chris stuck his arm down in front of the rad to check the airflow and squeezed the rad top tube to see if the coolant system was generating pressure, when a pencil stream of water shot out of the front of the rad onto Chris’ arm. This was hot enough to cause the involuntary response of yanking his arm out while scraping it against the sharp metal of the grill metal. Sometimes cars act like they don’t want to be fixed.
We had uncovered a radiator leak – this would normally be a real downer, but probably saved outrbutts from getting stranded a week later if we hadn’t found it right then. A place in town had a new radiator, so we ended up picking it up Monday and installing it Tuesday. [/josh]
Tuesday
[Josh] After putting in the new radiator and doing some driving, we’re still running hot. The cooling system should be running at max effectiveness with the thermostat removed, but its just keeping up – we’re around 200F around town. It just seems high, and we’re about to head off for 3800 miles. We keep thinking about the head gasket. We think we could have a slow leak, but there is no milkshake oil, no oil or gas in the water, no bubbles in the water, and no steam. If it’s a leak, it’s definitely a minor one. The crux is whether or not it’s stable thing. If it hangs in there as-is we’ll be fine. If it’s something that’s prone to getting worse, 3800miles is a lot to ask. This is a tough decision – we can do the job, but we only have a couple days left. Is it bad enough to do major surgery? We’re going to be working fast, outdoors, and it looks rainy this week. If we doof something up during the job, then we’re basically out.
Chris decided to order parts overnight – head bolts, head gasket. I hooked up with the Stahl Willie tool guy at the Lexus dealer and picked up the special tool for the head bolts – and Chris lined up south Austin machine shop who could flycut the head deck for us in an afternoon. We agree to push the decision to Thursday, the day before we’re planned to leave Austin. We figure if we pass on the head gasket job, we can still take the parts with us – so if we blow out on the road, we still might have a chance to fix it in the field. I’m not sleeping super well at this point.[/josh]
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