1985-1998 [Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
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Hi all,
Just thought I would relate a story about what happened to me yesterday. I was driving my 97 9000 Aero for about 20 minutes when my wife, who is pregnant and in her 37th week, noticed steam rising under the hood from the area of the coolant expansion bottle. The gauge was pegged to the highest so I pulled over to a gas station and popped the hood. The expansion bottle was full and the rad fan was working fine.
I let it cool down for ½ an hour and then started on my way again. Although the temp gauge read ‘low’ when I started to drive, it quickly climbed to ‘high’ again. After 5 minutes I shut it down again, kept the rad fan running and let it sit for 40 minutes. No visible leaks, just possible boil over from the bottle.
Started out again, made it over the Lions Gate bridge in Vancouver, BC and entered onto the freeway. During this time I noticed the temp gauge going up, then down and then it quit altogether. Perplexed, I thought if I’m on a highway traveling at 100Kms, the air should help keep the system cooler. My next brilliant idea was to turn the cabin heat on, as I had always heard that helps cool systems down that are overheating.
A few minutes after this, we hear a ‘swoosh’ and the cabin of the car immediately filled with thick, choking steam. By immediate, I mean in a millisecond we were driving in rush hour at 100kms+ completely blind. I couldn’t even see the steering wheel in front of me or my wife beside me let alone the cars in front, behind or on either side of me.
All I could do was keep the car as straight as possible and brake as safely as possible without either crashing the car, hitting the cement divider or getting rear-ended. While trying to stop the car, all I was waiting to hear was the sickening sound of steel crashing into steel.
I finally stopped the car and miraculously, was not hit and didn’t cause any accidents. 3 or 4 people came rushing up asking if the car was on fire. I still couldn’t see anything and was fighting to get all the windows down to clear the steam. Needless to say it took a few seconds for us to compose ourselves. These same people then stopped traffic so I could get the car over to the shoulder of the highway. Many thanks to them all for helping.
I guess the moral of this story is for me to just pull the damn car over at the first hint of trouble, get it towed either home or to a shop and get alternative transport to my destination. When I think of the possible consequences of my "get the car home so I can look at it" mentality, I feel really ill.
I still am not sure why the car overheated in the first place. It always ran with the gauge between low and middle, never venturing above the middle. I can only assume the system was so overheated that the buildup had to force it’s way out the weakest part of the system, which in my case was the heater core. I can’t imagine how many other things I screwed up by continuing to drive it.
Be safe people….a tow truck bill or cab ride doesn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things…this I now know.
Norm
1997 9000 Aero 5-speed 86,000Kms
1989 900TC 5-speed 151,000kms
1987 900TC 5-speed (converted) 238,000kms
posted by 207.194.9...
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