rev up your engines, today I'm gonna show you how you can keep your cars cooling
system working great in hot weather so you don't have to worry about destroying
your engine from overheating and I'm gonna show you how you can avoid ripoff
repairs that you don't actually need when it comes to your cooling system now
the cooling system your car takes excess heat that the engine creates from
burning gasoline picks that heat up using the coolant which is 50% water and
50% antifreeze then the water pump the little pump pumps the water from the
engine through the radiator and the radiator dissipates neat then it goes
back to the engine and the never-ending cycle of hot or cool or hot or cooler
simple idea with modern computer control cars it can get a little complicated
when I was young mechanic all the fans that cooled engines were just a
mechanical fan that bolted on the end of the water pump and when a fan belt spun
it it made the air suck through that's why they were called fan belts they made
the fan go now today that's politically incorrect they called them drive belt
because they drive things because most of them don't have a fan that runs off
the fan belt to use electric cooling motors like it's broken set that I took
off of an acura a few weeks ago and some modern cars even use an electric
water pump now really when you think of that I see
a lot of problems you got a mechanical one it just spins pretty simple , you got an
electric one that means you got an electric motor with electricity pumping
hot coolant with all kinds of chemicals in it that's bolted to a hot engine they
generally tend to fail more than the mechanical ones and of course they cost
tons more but I'm gonna start with the simple ones mechanical water pumps it
most vehicles still have what a lot of people don't realize this these pumps
have what are called we poles okay this is the pump side this is a side that the
belt drives and if you look inside here there's the weep hole it's a hole that's
inside here that goes to where the bearing and the seal is at the pump
spins on and this may sound crazy to you but the weep holes are designed to do
exactly what they're called they can weep a little coolant because the seal
that's inside the keeps the coolant from flying out is
generally a rubber base seal it's on the shaft that spins if it's not lubricated
and ran dry it would certainly burn out fast
then the coolant would leak out it'd be the end of the water pump so what the
weep holes do is they allow a little bit of coolant to seep through they keep the
seal moist so it doesn't go bad recently dodge you had to recall a bunch
of their pickup trucks because they put out water pumps it didn't have weep hole
now I don't know if it was just moronic engineer's thinking Oh we'll try making
them without weep holes or they just built them wrong but regardless they
sold a bunch of them they have no weep holes on the water pumps water pumps
broken in some cases when a water pumps broke they actually called electrical
fires because metal parts hit wires broke the wire started fires but
regardless you're gonna have a badly overheated engine if a water pump wrecks
anyways which is a royal pain and a wazoo if it's your car now we're
certainly dumb enough to make them without weep holes but here's something
that I've seen people get ripped off over the ages over and over again since
these weep holes can leak a little bit they weep some dishonest mechanics will
look at your current say look at the water pump there's coolant coming out
there you need a new water pump now sure if coolant squirting out of it it's shot
it's got to be replaced but they're designed to weep a little bit so if
there's a little bit and you're not adding coolant and you don't see it
dripping on the ground it's perfectly normal for this design I've seen people
spend a whole bunch of money especially on Mercedes Benz is worth a water pump
job can easily top a thousand dollars on many of their designs the people paid to
get him changed and they didn't even need him changed because it was just the
weep hole doing its normal job so you see a little bit here and there means
nothing it's pouring out sure course replace it don't get suckered into
buying a part that you don't need and here's something that normally gets
ignored the simple old radiator cap now radiators hold a reasonable amount of
pressures when I was younger was a lot lower pressure because they had bigger
radiators but to make cars cheaper they made the radiator smaller and increase
the pressure so my pure physics they'll cool just as well a large radiator with
lower pressure it has a lot more places to dissipate the heat from so it doesn't
need a higher pressure but a smaller radiator especially one here
one row of coolers it needs a higher pressure in order to get rid of the eat
and that cap holds that pressure in now you can see they're simple devices
there's a rubber seal there's a spring inside and many of them have this extra
little plastic Pop off valve here these Japanese ones if you find out this
plastic part is missing this falling off they often break just replace the
radiator cap or if you see cracks on the rubber seals replace the radiator cap
but really these things are so cheap if you keep your cars along every 5 or 6
years just go buy a new cap then you have to think about it cuz the rubber
seals can wear the plastic pieces can break and the springs can wear out not
hold as well you know you can easily just change it yourself every once in a
while and while you're at it check the neck of the radiator all radiators are
plastic even us all 94 has a plastic radiator and a lot of times as they age
the lip that it seals the plastic gets brittle and starts to crack and break
off and if it does guess what it's time for a new radio it's easy to see those
cracks and today hey aftermarket plastic aluminum radiators
that they don't cost much I replaced this one ages ago I paid $69 for a brand
new one yeah it was made in China but they
weren't perfectly fine and a spoiler cooling fans start your car up I turn
the air conditioning on full blast if you have air conditioning if you
you don't have ac then let it sit in idle while you watch the temperature
gauge when the temperature gauge starts to give towards the metal you should see
the fans come on okay that one's fine that one's fine you can feel them
blowing if you do have a to fan system make sure that both fans are working
correctly even though they'll work perfectly fine on one fan the car won't
get hot hot hot but it will run a little bit warmer and over time can damage your
engine so let's say you got a car summer normally runs a little over halfway and
all of a sudden you find out it's running between 1/2 and 3/4 check your
fans first could just be that one of the fans is burning out and there's so many
aftermarket fans available that work fine maybe your dealer fan is $500
generally you can get aftermarket ones for eighty ninety dollars that work
perfectly fine and if you're a cheapskate you can even buy just motor
replacements on and you can rewire it and save even more
money put in a universal fan motor on there just electric DC motors are simple
things it's not rocket science and in modern cars above all keep clean coolant
and your cooling system dirty coolant corrodes things water pump will wear out
can corrode the aluminum in the engine the aluminum a radiator but here's
something that a lot of people don't know in a minor car
the coolant gets too dirty it can actually start conducting electricity I
have had customers bring me cars some of them were like seven eight years old
coolants never been changed and they were getting a check engine light and
they're getting all these crazy sensor codes and I found out that the reason
all those codes are tripping because the coolant was dirty was now conducting
electricity it was messing up the readings of all these electronic sensors
and with the insanity of modern cars and all the lines of codes that they have if
you start getting even two different sensors giving bad readings the computer
tries to compensate then it can trip other quotes I've seen some cars that
had 40 different codes in them and I went back to really dirty coolant was
the problem that was shorting things out it's big enough thing sup one of the big
things that are needed in a modern car to keep the cooling system working right
it's a good battery an alternator charging a battery all the electronic
controls those big cooling fans to use a lot of amperes to run themselves they
need a good supply of electricity if the battery's weak
alternators weak or even something as dumb as the battery terminals are all
corroded and they're getting hot because there's too much corrosion and that
builds up electrical resistance so they needs more power and it gets hot and it
starts straining the electrical system weak power Hey the fans might not even
bow is fast they got enough power to make them spin but not make them spin as
hard as they could say you find you got your car that runs fine on a highway
when you're going 65 because all that air is blowing through the radiator but
when you're in town it runs a lot warmer and you look and you see the fans are
still blowing but you put your hand there and you don't seem to be blowing
as hard as they were that can be as simple as a dirty battery terminal a
weak battery or an alternator isn't charging enough any good mechanic not
all the part starts to they can check your charging system in like two minutes
you always want to start there with a mind
car low voltage can create so many different problems and it's such a
simple thing to check so now you know all about your car's cooling system and
things you can do to ensure that it remains trouble-free taking all that
excess heat from your engine because if your engine can run cool so can you
while you're driving it, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car
repair videos, remember to ring that Bell