rev up your engines, today I'm gonna show you how you can make your cooling system
last as long as possible in your car, now engines put out a tremendous amount of
heat, if you don't dissipate the heat the engine will get hotter and hotter and
eventually it'll melt inside, the bearings will go first cuz they're the softest
and then goodbye engine, and you might say Scotty but there's air cooled engines
they don't even have radiators how come they don't melt, well they use the oil as
coolant, like my motorcycle there, it even
has a giant oil radiator in the front to dissipate the heat, they use the oil to
dissipate the heat and the air going over the fins of the engine, they're
still using a liquid, in this case oil to cool the engine, and these cooling
systems have a few main components, they have the radiator that dissipates the
heat, they have some type of cooling fan that sucks air through it when you're
going at lower speeds, they have a water pump that pumps the
water through the engine into the radiator and back in again, and they have
this little piece here called the thermostat that allows the engine to
warm up faster, it stays closed when the engine is cold, so the engine can warm up
and the water doesn't go from the engine to the radiator and cool, and then once
it gets hot, the little valve inside it expands it opens up, then it lets the hot
water from the engine go through the radiator and be dissipated to the
atmosphere, now here I'm going to start with something no one ever thinks about
the thermostat it's hidden inside the engine, you can't see it it's inside here
in a little housing, has two bolts holding it on, and as you drive they open
and close and open and close thousands of times, but if they ever stick shut
your engine is gonna overheat, so it's a good idea just for peace of mind every
four or five years change your thermostats so it won't stick, and take
my advice buy OEM original equipment thermostats, yeah maybe you'll
spend twenty-five dollars instead of nine ninety-five but it's saving your
engine, buy the original equipment one so you don't have to think about it for
years and years, because over the last fifty one years of fixing cars I've had
customers, they had a cheap one put into their car, the stupid thing
shut stuck eventually, and they ended up blowing their engine, they were on a highway,
next thing they knew, the temperature was at
the H and the engine stopped running, and in most cases changing the thermostat
isn't that big of a deal, like I said this is
two bolts holding it, now there are some cars like some of these crazy
Volkswagen hey some of these things you gotta practically
take the engine apart to get to them that's just their crazy design, and some
of them like those Volkswagens are electronic, they're not just a simple
mechanical thing, they're run electronically and it costs a lot of
money, they do break down more often, I think it's a stupid design but hey
that's the Germans for you with their high-tech and more efficiency, now the
next thing that's often forgotten is the radiator cap, it's a pressurized system
so it's got to hold a certain amount of pressure, check them every once awhile if
you see the rubber insides all cracked, sometimes on these Japanese ones
this plastic piece here breaks and falls off so you buy a new one, and they will
just lose the spring pressure over years and years, so again maybe it's a
good idea to buy a new cap every four or five years, and there's another trick to
make your cooling system last as long as possible, I've been using this at 205
reseal for years, got an old bottle of it here, I put in an old Windex bottle, you
can spray it all over the rubber hoses to keep them from cracking, it's a rubber
rejuvenator it keeps the rubber nice and supple
I showed some guys I know that play golf this, they put it on the handles of all their
golf clubs and they said, Man they lasted so
much longer, because it kept it all from deteriorating from all the sweat in
their hands and whacking and pressure of hitting the golf ball hard, and there's
some proof right here, the rubber seal on a headlight this is a 25 year old rubber
seal, it's still pliable and looks good because I've been using at 205 reseal on
it since I bought it about I don't know 14 years ago, make sure you have good air
flow going through it, plastic bags can get sucked in there and if you live out
in a country and the summer and drive at night a lot, you're gonna get it covered
with bugs hey those little bitty holes that the
air goes through they get blocked by a bunch of bugs it's not gonna cool right,
so look in there every once in a while, see if there's any bug
stuck on there just remember the radiator is here, but you
have the condenser in front of it, so you have to check the condenser too, because
the condenser has the air go through that before it hits the radiator, and in
most modern cars today the a/c condenser it's in front of the radiator ,so you got
to make sure that isn't covered with bugs or plastic or anything that would
stop air flow, especially in the summer hey check it every once in a while,
because if those bugs are on there, it gets hot they'll bake on and be really hard to
get off, if you check it every once in a while and then hose it down with a water
hose, you can get them off a lot easier than if they baked on and it can be a
royal pain to get off then, but if they do get baked on heck you can go to one
of those car washes and it has one of those magic pressure wands, and you can
squirt it all over and get the stupid bugs off, now the next thing to check are
the cooling fan, this one has two cooling fans, so turn the AC on full
blast, then check the fans, this one is blowing and that one's blown they're blowing
fine, when you turn the AC on it'll make all the fans run if it sits for a few
minutes, you got to make sure both fans work, I've had many customers over the
years have cars where one fan was burnt out, and the other one wasn't, and even
though the car ran okay, it was running too hot, you don't want a strain an
engine by having it run too hot just because some stupid fan motor wasn't
working, now of course you want to keep your cars coolant clean, modern coolant
lasts an awful long time, whatever yours is set up for change it then, some of the
modern Toyotas, hey they can go seven years 150,000 miles before you have to
change it, so just follow that if you keep your cars that long, if you don't
you don't have to do anything, but if you keep them long like me of course you
have to change the coolant when it's time, because additives all break down
over time and even though cars used to be cast-iron and they rusted now they're
aluminum, aluminum actually corrodes just as bad as iron rusts, and the corrosion
will build up, and when it comes to the radiators themselves, here's a tip for
modern cars, when I was a young mechanic radiators were made out of brass and
copper, when they got old and dirty we had some good acid flushes, we could
flush all the corrosion out of them clean them up and then drive down the
road, but modern radiators they're made out of plastic and aluminum, it's lighter
weight and the main reason is, it's so much cheaper to manufacture them, but
these radiators they don't really flush when they get corroded inside, pretty
much you throw them away and buy another radiator, because not only our modern
radiators aluminum, they have smaller holes in
them, the old radiators had big passageways that you could clean out okay
but the new ones they're so tiny inside that you try flushing it, it just pushes
the crud into a little hole further and doesn't often fix it, and here's a
little tip on how you can check to see if your radiator is clogging up inside
these temperature guns are cheap as heck now this one was like twenty dollars
when a vehicle's running you can take temperatures of various parts of the
radiator, because if you haven't found a problem anywhere else, it could be your
radiator just doesn't dissipate heat anymore, this shows it quite well and in
a rather strange way too, because when you're taking the temperature if you
find one area is a lot colder than the rest, that means that that area is clogged
up, now that sounds crazy but it is logical, because if you have a blockage
in one area, none of the coolant is going through
there, so that's not going to be hot like the surrounding areas that have hot
coolant going through it, even though that particular area itself is cool
because it's blocked up, it's not cooling the engine down, it just makes the engine
hotter just think, if your entire radiator wasn't getting hot and was
cold, that would mean nothing is flowing through it and it would really overheat
so when you find areas that are cold, that means your radiator is shot and you
need another one, you can take advantage of the cheaper radiators because they
cost a lot less, over the years I have bought aftermarket plastic and aluminum
radiators from many different manufacturers, and truth be told they all
work perfectly fine, I had a guy with a BMW once, and the dealer wanted nine hundred
dollars for a radiator, and I got one for like one hundred and twenty-nine dollars
that was made China and work perfectly fine, so now you
know how to make your vehicle's cooling system last as long as possible, because
if your engine overheats, you're probably gonna blow a head gasket
on that one when you find out how much money it costs, so if you never want to
miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!