More Strange 240 issues - Read on!

Hey all,

A few months ago I asked for your help in determining a noise which ended up being detonation. My mechanic suggested off the top of his head that a radiator replacement would be in order. Instead I changed the coolant and that has seemed to help a fair bit.

Here's the puzzling bit. My car has never dripped a drop and has always kept all it's fluids in when parked. I noticed a week after the coolant flush that the temperature was climbing again so I checked the coolant level to find that the expansion tank was nearly empty! I drove over to Mr. Lube and had them fill it up for me. I checked under the car several times thereafter and have found no evidence of a leak.

Now, two weeks later, I drove accross town for about 15 minutes and parked without incident. I retuirned to the car twice to get things, both times approaching from the front and saw nothing on the pavement but old dried stains. On the final return to the car I observed a puddle of coolant and a splatter-pattern around it as well as a trail where it has run into the gutter. I estimated about half to three-quarters of a litre had spilled. I checked under the hood and the expansion tank was almost empty again. I topped it up from a jug and have been driving and observing it for the last 2 days and it has lost no coolant and the tank is at max.

Could it be some kind of pressure release safety thing? The puddle was almost right under the front license plate. The tank is dry on the outside. The engine compartment is generally dirty so I can't see if it came from high in the compartment or the underside of the rad.

Is this a sign that the rad is truly toast?

Thanks for reading this long-winded posting, blurp

I had one like this about two years ago. There was a small split in the bottom of the expansion tank. It would not normally leak because there was not enough pressure to push the coolant out of the tank. But I kept getting low on coolant and it was in the summer. One day I drove and parked, came back out, looked and saw coolant under the car but not under the radiator. I thought that maybe the problem was a different car that had the spot before me. But I kept loosing coolant and adding it. I thought I had a head gasket leak and was dreading that.

I took the thing to my mechanic and parked it in the lot and went in. He said to go back out and bring it in for a look see. When I went out, after stopping in the hot summer, enough pressure had built up in the expansion tank to open the split and the expansion tank was leaking. I real quick opened the hood and I saw the expansion tank taking a piss on the exhaust manifold. Some of the coolant was evaporating and some was rolling back on the exhaust pipe to a point just under the firewall.

The mechanic called Volvo for the exhorbinant price on the coolant tank

-- about $60-75 I d>