Car's engine underwater.

Oh yes you can. I remember fixing the gasket on an MG TF where on removal of the head some of the bores were full to the top with water. Maybe not on modern cars with lower capacity rads.

Reminds me of when my brother baught an expensive new portable television for his boat. A few days later, in it's berth in Birdham Pool, the boat started to sink. One of the cooling water feed pipes to the engine had burst. By the time the boatyard got pumps on board, the tele was underwater. In fact most of the boat was. It was almost up to deck level. This is a 35ft motor sailer we're talking about. That's a lot of water.:-) After we arrived, dragged everything out, fixed the pipe and pumped the boat dry, we took the cover off the tele, and thoroughly hosed it down with fresh water to get rid of any salt. Brother took it home, blew it out with an airline, then left it just above a radiator for a week. Plugged it in, switched on and it worked fine. was still working 2 years later when it was replaced by a better one. Mike.

The message from Lee contains these words:

Last time I had bad smoke was when I noticed that the main feed to the starter motor had been vibrating against the battery tray. The startlingly bite shaped cut was what attracted my attention - it'd clearly been doing it for some time gradually eroding the tray as I went over bumps.

Did I do the right thing?

No - I grabbed the lead and waggled it - which made quite firm contact, spotwelding the lead to the tray - whereupon it smoketh full mightily.

"Mike G" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net...

Reminds me of the time I left a cordless phone outside. The dry electronics thing, not the boat. I have a boat story too which involves rain shorting out the bilge pump, not a good idea when moored in Loch Lomond, but I'll leave that one for later. Right , back to the off topic, not the off off topic. The phone story is I left a phone sitting on the bonnet of my Volvo after a drunken barbeque at my neighbours house. It was one of three, one of which I'd already broken by dropping it from the roof of my house (yet another storey) bad pun on spelling there. I woke up in the morning, late, I knew the bedroom phone was in the bedroom, but could I find the living room phone? No. I pressed the button on the base unit to make the phones squawk, wandered all over the house, gave up and went out to the car to go for a paper. My wife continued the search for the phone, and as I approached the car I could hear a squawk. Saw the phone on the scuttle, saw it was drenched after the night of rain we had had, picked it up relieved it still worked even though it was drenched. I thought to myself, put it on a radiator, leave it to dry and it will be OK. With this thought, I punched the button to silence it and was greeted by an acrid smell of burning electronics, or perhaps, electrics. Shortly after this I bought a new set of phones and the family hates the way I keep them in ziploc bags. By the way the boat almost sank. This one

The back of Pulsar Lighting Rock desks acually had the instructions on the back, that in the event of beer being spilled into them, unplug, plunge in bath & leave in airing cupboard for 48 hrs

Ah. Forgot that. Haven't had a car under water for some time. Radiomics, now, are different. But they're often on at the time. And it's sometimes the loo they're dropped down. ;-)

Ahhh yes - radiomics - ziploc bags, if none to hand use condoms.

These photos were taken in 2003 when the first section was brought ashore, totally awesome:

Given time yes. The flow rate through the inlet valve will be a lot larger than for a blown head gasket which was the situation I was envisaging - ie water ingestion through the intake when the engine was running.

We had a coolant leak at work a short while back. Anything that gets soaked in hot glycol generally doesn't work as we found out. Cost our insurers a huge amount.

Our desks also have the beer warning, but so far have only been field tested with coffee.....

Yes, you certainley do:-)I hit what I thought was a puddle on a country road that actually turned out to be quite a deep, flooded dip in a Berlingo van. One bent bumper, one activated airbag (that WAS a shock.. from a puddle!) and an utterly ruined engine. The "puddle" was about 2 1/2 ft deep and I hit it at about 40mph. Oh yeah, and one extremely unimpressed boss - the van was a month old, had 2500 miles on it and I'd been there 2 weeks...

Mike

The message from "Tim S Kemp" contains these words:

D'yer remember Michael Palin trying to buy condoms in China so he could drop a microphone into the Yelllow River to record the sounds of the nearly extinct Yellow River Dolphin in "Last Chance to See"? The Chinese don't take kindly to foreigners trying to buy a dozen condoms and telling strange tales about what they want to do with 'em when asked.

VIC-20, C64, various PCs. We now have one shiny new(ish) PC, one shiny new(ish) laptop, a steam-driven PII PC, a dead laptop and a decommissioned (but still functional, I think) Mac. Oh, and I think the C64 is still in the loft somewhere.

The real collectors seem to be UNIX geeks who can't bear to let any bit of beloved hardware end up in the company skip.

Thank you all who answered. It was quite educating. (Especially parts about ancient computing devices and sunken electronics. :) ) So far, I can make a conclusion that car engine _can_ be recovered after full immersion in water (at least theoretically). However, rain/river water is never even close to clean, let alone distilled, but rather contains a lot of dissolved substances and dirt. That fact makes engine recovery probably too expensive in certain cases. So, throwing it away and replacing with new one can be cheaper option, actually.

Moreover, from the same person I heard that there are car engines which designed with possibility of immersion in head. Army vehicles come to mind. I assume that in army car stereo is of least importance while endurance of engine is of higest one. These engines can survive more or less short periods of immersion and some of them can even _function_ properly being completely underwater! Tanks that are capable of crossing small rivers come to mind.

I think that Camel Trophy jeeps are equipped with some kind of such engines, since they constantly crossing small rivers and pools. Also, their exhaust and air intake tubes are raised above engine. (For example, see photos here:

I suppose it is a sad indictment of Michael Palin that he wasn't already carrying enough "essential travel equipment" for his possible needs in the first place.

Even so, you'd think he could borrow a packet of three off one of the roadies, they're used to bringing along a box for the dewdrops.

First off, we had an old ZX81 that was given to us, and never any real use. Could never get a tape recorder to properly work with it. I remember the days of typing out a long BASIC program which was some sort of game (script was in a magazine my Dad brought home), but if we wanted to play the game we had to type it out every time, as there was no way of saving it. Not very practical.

We then had an Amstrad PCW8256 (got a 512K RAM upgrade for it after a while). Bloody excellent computer for its time - obviously limited in what it could do, but for the purpose, did the job very well.

Then a Dell 386SX 16MHz, then a Pentium 133, now a P3-450Mhz.

Since I started uni I've had a P3/733MHZ (bought back then for about £400). Worth about 50p now, but still does just fine for what I use it for, though I can't deny I'm tempted by the sheer cheapness of new PCs at the moment.

Peter

-- "The humble bic biro draws 13 beards, 9 devil moustaches and 49 penises on newspapers in its lifetime."

I've always reckoned that there should be no reason why dipping any electrical appliance in water to clean it (i.e. get rid of dust), providing that absolutely everything is dried thoroughly. Which I guess is the big problem with sensitive electronics - I guess it's possible for water to condense on the surfaces inside microchips and such like, which would be very hard to make escape in any way.

If that isn't the case, and putting something above a radiator (like a computer, for example) would do the trick, then it'd be an easy way to rid a computer of dust, though I can imagine one of those minature blowers/vaccuum cleaners would be quicker.

Peter

-- "The humble bic biro draws 13 beards, 9 devil moustaches and 49 penises on newspapers in its lifetime."

The message from "AstraVanMan" contains these words:

Took two weeks before my mobile recovered from being left out in a downpour.

So, who knows anything about boats?

Why did the bigger one sink?