Still Overheating

[MikeWire]

this is the main problem with starting another thread on the same topic by the same person

the op has tried 3 different t-stats and even ran the engine without one.

please people..keep everything on one thread

Ah, thx Dennis - we need some cliff notes here!

Well, if he runs no thermo and the top hose is still cool, then he must have some sort of blockage in the coolant passages somewhere. Maybe reverse flush the block and the blockage will come out?

 

[TexasRho83]

this is the main problem with starting another thread on the same topic by the same person

Please clarify...

 

[MikeWire]

Please clarify...

See http://www.fordtruckfanatics.com/forum/showthread.php?t=13760

 

[TexasRho83]

Ahhhhhhhh then I totally agree with Dennis to keep it all on one thread...

 

[Ridgerunner]

Ah, thx Dennis - we need some cliff notes here!

Well, if he runs no thermo and the top hose is still cool, then he must have some sort of blockage in the coolant passages somewhere. Maybe reverse flush the block and the blockage will come out?

How did I get in this?

 

[MikeWire]

Ah! there's another one!??!

Nice to meet you too Dennis II (or are you I?). lol

 

[Ridgerunner]

Ah! there's another one!??!

Nice to meet you too Dennis II (or are you I?). lol

Nope I'm Cliff

 

[Mil1ion]

My name is Cliff... drop over sometime

Sinned, is Dennis backwards

 

[MikeWire]

Oh ok not another Dennis....you are the guy who writes the notes huh?

I'm a little slow today - ha.

 

[shortbed]

You guys are having a party in my Overheating thread . . . Okay . . . I wish I had some potato salad and cold drinks to set out but everything I’ve got is steamed.
Well, nobody in town had a radiator, ‘cept, Porky. He had one that he wanted $85 for, but when we looked closer the hoses wouldn’t have lined up. I called a couple of local guys but no one was home so . . . Tomorrow I’m going to take out the radiator and try to flush it with a hose, maybe try to back flush the engine too.
But here is something new, just came to me a few minutes ago. I started using Lucas’s Upper Cylinder Lubricant about three weeks before all this overheating started up again. It occurred to me that maybe this stuff loosened something that clogged a screen or small passageway somewhere in the engine.
A trucker suggested I try using a quart or half a quart of transmission fluid in my oil as an engine flush. This I understand would not be flushing the coolant passageways, but if the engine is overheating because of an oil system clog, maybe that could help.
I don’t know . . . but what has absolutely amazed me through all of this . . . and, present company excluded, of course, but one guy tells me ‘fan shroud, absolutely, that’s your problem,’ the next says ‘it’s your hoses, they’re collapsing, get better hoses and that will fix it, I’m sure of it,’ ‘You’ve got a head gasket leak. There’s no doubt about it.’ These were real guys, mechanics, here in town and this just goes on and on. Yesterday I had two mechanics here in town tell me I must have a fan shroud, that’s the problem, then today a mechanic tells me they are not so important and another one tells me he takes his off because they are useless, God as my witness . . It sorta makes a guy stare up at the sky with an odd sort of smile on his face, like he’s been hit between the eyes with a rubber mallet.
I think it is very curious that such a finite thing as an engine, formed in a factory like all its parts, could have such a unique existence that nobody ‘really’ understands why it does the things it does. And you know, actually, I kinda like that.

 

[TexasRho83]

but what has absolutely amazed me through all of this . . . and, present company excluded, of course, but one guy tells me ‘fan shroud, absolutely, that’s your problem,’ the next says ‘it’s your hoses, they’re collapsing, get better hoses and that will fix it, I’m sure of it,’ ‘You’ve got a head gasket leak. There’s no doubt about it.’ These were real guys, mechanics, here in town and this just goes on and on. Yesterday I had two mechanics here in town tell me I must have a fan shroud, that’s the problem, then today a mechanic tells me they are not so important and another one tells me he takes his off because they are useless,

Just because someone works on an engine, doesn't make him a mechanic...Now if these guys have ASE credentials on their wall, that's another matter. As for the fan shroud, I haven't run one on my last 2 trucks and didn't have an overheating problem. I do recommend having one though, but I'm not going out of my way to locate one is all...if one were to happen to fall in my lap I'd take it and slap her on haha

 

[bowtiehatr]

to properly clean a radiator they have to be dissassembled. running water through them is basically what you are doing when the engine is running but you cant tell if any of the flus are stopped up. you need to have it opened up to see if the flus are stopped up. if they arent, look for a headgasket issue

 

[TexasRho83]

Yep, it's quite possible the original overheating issue was a bad radiator/thermo but that, in turn, caused head warpage...

 

[Mil1ion]

did all this start when you drained the cooling system ?

if you never ran the engine to operating temp with the rad cap off ,you can cause an air lock which will blow coolant when the engine is hot.

 

[shortbed]

I can’t believe you guys haven’t gotten fed up with me and my truck. I’m fed up with me and my truck. Yesterday I drove into town. I live in a valley in the mountains of Virginia. Getting into town . . . a small town, population 140 souls, each of which --- having polled a select cross section --- has a different opinion of what is wrong with my truck . . . means driving over a mountain. Getting into a town big enough to buy a new radiator or rod out the radiator I’ve got etc. means driving over another, bigger mountain. By the time I get to flat land my truck has already overheated once. Driving around in city traffic and getting home again means subjecting my poor old truck to a great deal of heat and as TexasRho83 suggested, testing the patience of my truck’s head as well as mine.
So yesterday I used my cell phone in town and called all the radiator shops down where they have things like traffic lights (there is, I’m proud to say, not a single stop light in the entire county where I live).
Well, long story short, rodding isn’t going to pay off. I stopped one guy when he got to the price of a new radiator, “and that’s just labor,” he said. It was the same or worse with the rest of them. And they want to hold the truck overnight, another real problem for me.
And with each of the parts places, they have to special order a new radiator and, of course, they always seem to get the wrong one when it shows up.
Advance Auto’s computer shows a radiator for my truck that does not fit my truck (I was ready to buy one a couple of days ago because it was in stock, but when I got there . . . wrong size). I went through this the last time and finally the store manager in Fayetteville, NC, where I bought that last radiator six months ago, did some fancy footwork and was able to get the right one in the next day, but going through that on the phone, here, is not something I look forward to doing. And who knows what they would come up with at Auto Zone or NAPA, and everybody wants cash on the barrelhead before they order these things from their own warehouses.
I’ve been trying to find someone up here with a radiator. There is a real love of old Ford trucks up here and everyone knows someone who has parts and pieces of old pickups back behind the house or in the barn, but getting a hold of these guys is, well, it’s all country time, you know? up here.
So maybe that is the lesson. I’m living in the mountains and maybe the mountains are trying to teach me to settle down and trust what’s around the bend.

oh, and Mil1ion. thanks again . . for your thoughts on all this, but I have left the cap off and watched the coolant until the thermostat kicked open and started the water running, even reved the engine and watched the level go down and back up.

I might go for a walk today.

 

[Mil1ion]

If the system is locked up to soon while the engine is running,the air has nowhere to go. It has to be able to burp and can take up to 1/2 hour of running at normal operating temp with rad cap off to get all the air out,if that in fact is the problem.

It appears as boiling over like yours but it is just an air lock.

Note: I have had this air lock happen 5 times on all sorts of engines.. The Olds 403 was the worst.

The only other thing to cause overheating like yours ,is an engine out of time and climbing huge elevations.

 

[TexasRho83]

Whereabouts do you live? Sounds like heaven to me...

Dennis raised another good option: timing...have you checked that lately? By how much have you overheated and for how long? With constant overheating like that, I'd really start to look at your head being messed up by now. Even if you replace the radiator, the head may already be damaged, and chances are, your present radiator is fine.

 

[shortbed]

Okay, this is what I did today. I took out the radiator and, holding it upside down, vigorously flushed it with plain water, bringing out a fair amount of rust debris. Then I closed off the outlets and filled it with a 10 percent muriatic acid solution. I let that sit in the radiator for ten minutes, sloshing it back and forth every few minutes, then flushed, then filled again and sloshed, then flushed.
I talked with a local mechanic would said I could try the same solution for the engine (closing off the heater and running the engine with the two radiator hoses connected for about ten minutes . . . Warned that it could burn out one or more of my freeze plugs. I’m debating with myself about doing the engine flush.
Tomorrow I will probably get it out on a state road and see what happens.
(Texasrho83 . . . I live in the Virginia mountains, west of Roanoke)
You all will be the first to know what happens.

 

[Mil1ion]

That acid will ruin your water pump

 

[TexasRho83]

Muriatic is some wicked stuff. We used to use it to clean out our plastic mold cylinders we'd use to make concrete cylinders for testing... I wouldn't use it in my engine.