Zardoz wrote:
Garage called saying the fans weren't working (new fuse fixed them), they think the system was pushing out the coolant out of the valve cap on reservoir (explains the dried streaks on it). Told me to keep eye on it again for a couple of days and see how it goes. No charge.
They also mentioned it might possibly be the head gasket if it wasn't the lack of fans causing extra heat and said hopefully it wasn't that, I said hopefully it wasn't that too.
thats nice of them.
I took the scimitar out for its first run up to a car show about 8 miles away. thought it'd be funny to turn up at a slightly stuffy jaguar/landrover/leyland type show with a vaguely mad maxed thing and see who got upset but they were very accepting and generally thought it was pretty interesting.
however.
a couple of minutes up the road and the temp shot up. stopped and steam was happening, looked like a hose connection round the back of the engine at the heater matrix had been damaged so I bypassed it, topped up the water and carried on.
1 mile later same problem. checked again and this time could see that steam and water are jetting out the back of the engine at the headgasket area. Damn!
Took the radiator cap off and ran it till the water boiled up and fell out, stop and top up, repeat. fine. got there and back.
but whats the problem? why did it blow in the first place, it was a new gasket. the system runs at 1.1 bar so thats pretty normal, the hoses weren't rock hard so I dont reckon it was blowing from the cylinders into the water jacket.
It's got to be either a dodgy gasket, the cooling systems not beefy enough (radiators pretty wee), a crack in the block or head (Pleeease no no no) or the 11:1 compression's just too much for the gaskets I fitted which I think were not the cheapest but also not the ridiculous race ones.
Next step is rip it apart, fit new cyl head gaskets, put it back together... and see if it kills it again. or I could throw a bigger rad at it just to be on the safe side I suppose.