Need advice on radiator replacement

Peabody wrote in news:20101216-001312.310.0 @news.astraweb.com:

The water pump is at the back of the block, kitty-corner to the upper rad hose. You won't be able to reach it with tubing stuck into the upper hose outlet.

I suppose it might work, at least to a degree. Provided you managed to get the end of the siphon hose right to the bottom of the water jacket through the upper rad hose outlet, you'd be able to remove /most/ of the quart that's in the block.

But you'd still leave enough behind to compromise the new coolant and reduce the corrosion protection to the baseline 2-years, just as though you'd never tried that. Corrosion attacks the head-gasket first, and that's a very bad thing.

What you can do in lieu of pulling the block drain is to drain and fill the coolant as you just did, every two years. No need to remove the rad, just open the rad drain and let whatever wants to drain out, drain out (turn heater to full-hot first). That way most of the coolant will be fresh most of the time, and corrosion protection should be mostly OK.

Reply to
Tegger
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In an attempt to diagnose the problem, I rigged up a circuit tied in to the lines going to the two solenoids near the top of the transmission that shift the tranny into lockup. (I actually know something about electronics, as opposed to automotive stuff.) And I was out driving around at night so I could see whether the LEDs were blinking. But, the expected signals weren't being sent to the solenoids. Actually that was good news because it meant there probably wasn't anything wrong with the transmission.

It was at that point that someone suggested it might be a temperature problem - possibly a bad thermostat, or air that hadn't been bled out. So I tried the air bleed, and the tranny worked perfectly after that.

By the way, the proper signals going to the solenoids turned out to be a bit strange. One gets a solid 12V, but the other one gets a pulsing signal - modulated in some way.

Reply to
Peabody

Oh ye of little faith. :-)

Thanks very much for your help.

Reply to
Peabody

if it worked, that's great - i'm just saying that the switch is something you have to look out for because it's known to fail, and the commonly recommended searches of the coolant circuits can be a wild goose chase.

that's pulse width modulation - it's the way you get to vary the pressure in the solenoid switched hydraulic circuits between the two extremes of "on" and "off". it's used on lockup clutches in modern transmission control systems to provide partial slip and thus better ratio/engine power band matching and so both fuel economy and better drivability. my 96 accord does it.

Reply to
jim beam

That is one of the reasons that I pulled my fans first. They have to come off anyway and they are a piece of cake to remove.. Another reason was so I wouldn't make a huge mess with the coolant and tranny fluid.

Reply to
Ron

here's yet another reason why we know you haven't really done this ron - you don't have room to remove a fan assembly without dragging the edges of it over the radiator matrix. and when you do that, you don't just bend the fins, you can actually pierce the coolant tubes. indeed, i've watched someone do this when they thought they knew what they were doing but didn't.

to anyone else reading, do this job exactly like it shows in that video. take the whole shooting match out as a unit, swap all the parts, them put the new one back as a unit. making sure you unclip the transmission cooler hoses from the top.

the only mess you're making ron is the saliva you're drooling because you don't know when to keep your mouth closed.

Reply to
jim beam

Tell me HOW you change the fan motors if you can't remove the fan assemblies w/o damaging the radiator? Oh, that's right, you can't answer the question because you dug yourself into a hole.

Reply to
Ron

Just can't get out of that hole you dug for yourself, can ya? lol

Reply to
Ron

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