Cold has reared it's ugly head

[Brett Dikeman]

At 3:00 PM +0000 1/14/04, teamdaemon at comcast.net wrote:

>PS - Brett, if you are around this eve and and are willing to poke around tha
>car with me, BEvERages on me.  :)

Well, I'm not in much better shape than you- the Big Baby's been very 
finicky lately and loosing coolant.  It caused all manner of trouble 
this weekend at the winter driving school.

Weird things it has been doing:

-temp will not stay up on the highway, but then will be absolutely 
fine, staying dead on the quarter mark.  Shut it off, go in for a few 
minutes, come out- temp gauge spikes to almost the middle.  TONS of 
heat available usually during all of this.

-throttle response goes all wonky; acts almost like the bypass valve 
is shot.  Put the clutch in, idle drops too low and the engine 
catches.  Cruising, let up on the throttle, apply just a tad to get 
it off idle- there's actually almost what feels like a drop in power. 
Apply a little bit more throttle, and with a shudder, you get some 
power.

-coolant's leaking from somewhere(I've got one leak I know about, but 
it's very slow- I'm prety sure the other one is a crack in the 
after-run pump that Peter noticed)

-warms up MUCH quicker than it usually does, it seems

-this morning, warmed up very quickly, but then dropped, and I had 
little heat the entire trip in.

Oh, and to top it all off, the brakes are sticking in the cold and 
the e-brake cable clearly felt like there was ice in it.  Joy joy joy.

I'm happy to help, but not sure what we can do other than fill it 
with coolant, move it to one of the ramps so it is inclined, and 
purge any air via the method in the Bentley(which I believe consists 
of "idle it with the cap off until the second stage fan comes on, 
topping off as necessary").  Let's see what other listers come up 
with.

As for the coolant on the passenger side- sounds like either a 
massive headgasket failure(lets hope not), or the turbo's coolant 
lines.  Bring at least coolant and a flashlight or two...

No "you have no more coolant" warning?

B
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