Coolant overflow resevoir?

My radiator constantly holds water about 1.5" from the top. I've never had a coolant over flow resevoir. Could this be the reason my coolant barley, if ever, gets to operating temperature? Because I need an overflow resevoir? Ive changed the thermostat more then once to no avail.

 

my overflow reservoir consists of a gatorade bottle with some JB weld holding the hose in. normally i'd think that was awesome, but my radiator has two pinholes at the top right where the overflow hose connects, so when the pressure cap gives it just dribbles out into my fan blades.

my bet is you have a small hole in your radiator about 1.5" from the top. it may be keeping your water jacket from building pressure, which might be affecting things.

my other bet is that your temp gauge/sensor is bad. have you ruled this out?

 

Yea, its full when its hot. If I put in anymore, it just drains out the overflow tube. I've started it with a candy thermometer in the coolant, it it won't reach operating temperature, depending on the temperature outside.I guess I'll just leave it and not complain. I had the mojave heater and the stock heater running. I took out the stock heater, thinking maybe there was too much coolant hose. It didn't change anything.

 

Yea, I guess I'll take the thermostat out and throw it in a pot of water with a thermometer. I have done this before tho

 

i took the gatorade-bottle reservoir out of my jeep today and the metal hose nipple on the radiator decided to come off with it.

is this a bad thing?

 

I have a snapple bottle. R) And a pinhole in the upper tank. Runs about 180.

 

I just had my radiator rodded and am flushing the cooling system. Before I ran the prestone flush through it, I decided to change the thermostat and found that it was an original butterfly thermostat.

The original is stamped 180*, as is the new one, but the new one when suspended in a pot of hot water, begins to open at 180 whereas the service manual states the original thermo was supposed to begin opening at 165 and be completely open at 180. Have they changed how they rate thermostats from fully open to only beginning to open?

When I pulled the thermostat housing off, there certainly is a lot of garbage in the block that I hope gets flushed out. I feel like I need to exchange the 180 thermo I got (that begins to open at 180) for one that is rated at 165.

I also noticed that the original thermo, while it has the small 1/32"ish hole, also wasn't closing completely, even when I try to push it completely closed. I can take pictures and post them here if anyone hasn't seen one or wants to know WTF i'm talking about here.

I also need to make a new thermo housing gasket, any suggestions on what material to use? I have cork, rubber and some blue gasket material. I will pick up a new 7# cap and overflow hose as well (no expansion tank).

 

Ok, so I changed out the original thermo with a 160 unit, put on a new 7lb cap and made a new gasket from the blue cellulose material.

I put in a bottle of prestone radiator flush and 2 gallons of distilled water until the radiator was topped off. I opened the heater core and started her up. Well once I got up to temperature (after almost being asphyxiated in the garage from the exhaust fumes), it started PUKING coolant from the overflow hose, thankfully, I had thought ahead and put a catch can under the hose to catch what seemed like nearly a gallon of steaming coolant muck that came out.

I'll let it cool off tonight, then fill it tomorrow with just straight water, run it again till it gets hot, then drain that and refill with a 50/50 mix.

Am I making a giant mistake by not opening the block petcock and draining from there as well?

F134 is what I have. Oh, and I still get a drip drip of gas down the accelerator arm, when I reassembled the carb (Carter YF) around the arm I put a skinny rubber gasket, a metal piece, then a thick rubber gasket reading from bottom to top. Is that the correct order, or do I need to disassemble and shuffle them around, or tweak the float? I adjusted the float per the service manual when I rebuilt it.

 

I didn't know you could solder it. I'll do that on monday.

 

Sorry to revisit this thread, but I didn't want to add another thread to the forum. I put another new thermostat in and checked my temperature with a candy thermometer. Its running at 170. I tested the thermostat in a pot of water. Its rated for 195. It opens at 195, and closes at 170. Is this normal? Again, the running temp is consistent 170.

 

I just bought on at O'Rielley Auto

 

I ended up making a gasket out of the blue fiber gasket material, leaked a few drops when I first started back up, added another 1/4 turn to the studs, then once the gasket had a little liquid on it, it hasn't leaked another drop.

The temperature during an all day shakedown run gaining about 5500 vertical feet and 60-70 miles of 50/50 highway and offroad miles had everything running great. My fuel consumption was HALF of what it was on the same trip 9 months ago when the carb was clogged and dumping fuel and the radiator was never coming up to operating temp.

I still need to dump this last fill of pure water and refill 50/50 with Dexcool and distilled water and that job will be done for another year or so. Next is to pressure wash and degrease underneath and paint and undercoat everything. Its good to have friends who are also offroad junkies who happen to own a body shop/collision repair facility.