I dont know if I just have bad luck or what....but i really am getting sick of the smell of coolant.
Maybe yall rememebr awhile back when i was at the track and the watercock shattered and all my coolant came out in the staging lanes? Well, i took care of that problem...only to run into another.
I'm driving home today after a local meet (about a 20+ mile drive). I'm already scared about my car stalling as it is, due to the problems ive been having with the ECTS. So i get about 4-5 miles from home on the farm to market back woods cop alley road and i notice the familiar smoke coming from under the hood while i'm sitting at a light. Then, i could smell it and immediately i knew something was leaking coolant in the engine bay. But its 2 A.M. and i'm NOT about to pull over and turn the car off and strand myself, much less get the attention of a cop since i dealt with that last night (and many other nights). So I try to drive as easy as i can and i turned the ECON mode on full blast to try to keep the temps down. I see the needle rising quickly as i am lightly accelerating to make it those last few miles. It sits 1/8 an inch under the HOT mark but it doesnt go further as im coasting as much as i can. Luckily i get another green light and turn off the highway onto my twisty backroad street and manuever strategically through that.
I get home and find out that the coolant hose going to the heater core cracked right after it attaches to the hardline. It spewed that **** EVERYWHERE. I felt so bad for having to drive the car when it was getting hot like that.
So guys, replace your hoses whether they look solid or not...when your coolant hose cracks, and you lose all your coolant, your screwed.
Does anyone think i did any harm to my motor? It never passed the line or H mark or anything but it was getting up there...i drove it only like 5 miles, probably 8ish minutes like that. I could tell the coolant was completely gone when the air stopped blowing hot on ECON and it was within about a mile or two of my house.

 

Sorry to hear this. I'm not sure what damage was made to the car. I would start with a compression and leak down test first. Monitor the car's performance.

 

Check for leakes man.CHECK ALL HOSES PROPERLY.

 

i donno, usually i'd freak out about these things but for how little time i drove the car with it getting hot I cant imagine i damaged anything. Once i can get a new hose on it (probably gonna replace the other one too) i'll see if the car acts funny or anything.

 

You should probably change your oil too if the engine ran hot and definately change all of your hoses and make sure your radiator is ok. I'm at 175k and will need to do the hoses soon too.

 

damn really? I just changed the oil like 3 days ago. The radiator should be okay, its only a few years old and its metal.

 

pssshh, don't worry about the overheating doing anything to the motor, you didn't even hit the H mark, you have to tach that gauge out hard to even blow a headgasket

 

Good good, glad to hear from you! Don't forget though, I've got the 3.5 motor which people have blown headgaskets on before. What I was just thinking a minute ago is, how is the temp gauge accurate if there's no coolant in there for it to read from?
It was a cool summer night, and only for a couple easy miles but at the same time I was lookin at the gauge thinking the same thing "oh its not even to the H mark yet I'm okay".

 

I've overheated the royal **** out of mine on numerous occasions, and it still runs fine. Once I overheated it to the point that it shut off, and wouldn't start back up. Waited 10 minutes, ran like a dream, smooth as ever. A few times on the highway between MD and TN as well, would start acting weird, look at the temp gauge and it's tached out.

All of this because I never seem to pay attention to it. I need to find a way to wire up an LED or something to the gauge so it blinks or turns on when the temp gauge is about 3/4 of the way up...

 

why don't you just fix the cause of your overheating issue?

 

At the time it was a major water pump leak, I've since replaced that (several months now). The latest time it was on the highway, MAF was acting up, couldn't get past 2500 while chasing after some random A32 on the highway, pulled over to **** around with it, and noticed the steam from under the hood and the temp gauge pegged out.

That last time it had virtually nothing in the radiator, not quite sure why. No leaks, and it hasn't done it since, so I'm not too worried about it.

 

Oh Yeah? Well I feel better now then. I hope these hoses aren't 60 freakin bucks from the dealership...they usually give me a discount because I'm in there so often though.

I wish there was some kind of alternative to the rubber hoses.

Also, somehow I keep burning up the middle of my driver side radiator fan. The motor works fine but it melts the inside of the fan and just keeps spinning. it never made the temp gauge go up and someone said it was pretty hard to make the temp gauge move past its normal spot in the middle so I was questioning if the thing even worked until I saw it get up there the other night when the hose-explosion happened.