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alright..... so.....

i take off the radiator top & bottom hoses, drain that and the system best as i can off into a bowl...... somewhere along the line i add 3 pints of something or other to the mix (perhaps a preliminary flush-thru of the system with clean water?) and end up with a total of 3 litres of brown yuckiness in old 2L coke bottles... so far so alright looking. Do more flushing and chuck it away down drain (should probably recycle it but dont know where). Water colour from system: very nearly clear, from radiator: crystal.

at this point i dont realise that the capacity there is wrong

get thermo and sensor replaced, piece the whole caboodle back together with a lot of pain. undo bleed screw, start refilling. about a litre of de-ionised water goes in the expansion tank, minus a little spill caused by bubbling. then start adding the antifreeze. eventually the bleed screw starts bubbling, and then just leaks fluid. Do it up and continue filling, only to find i can't fill much further after a could more gloops.

Net total fluid added to system from bottles - probably about 1800cc.

Supposed capacity around 5600cc.

So what's the 3800cc discrepancy all about ???
Is it safe to run the motor right now, if only to get it out of the garage and onto a different part of a sloping driveway? and then to idle to normal cooling-fan speed?

silly thing.

Could be an airlock but its more likely that the engine isnt compelety drained of coolant (which is very difficult to do when the engine is still in the car) Do you have the in-car heater set to fully hot?

When I changed the coolant in mine, I managed to get a washing up bowl full of coolant (+ that spilt disconnecting the lower radiator hose). On filling, I managed to use a whole bottle of G12+ and the equivalent in water. I flushed the system by leaving the lower rad hose disconnected, and running the water through from the expansion tank. That seemed to get rid of everything.

Did you squeeze the pipes at all to remove any airlocks? I kept squeezing until I got the coolant bubbling in the expansion bottle, or the level of the expansion tank dropped (indicating that more coolant had found its way into the pipes).

Dunno if that helps you at all?

Karl.

yea could be an airlock...on mine..squeezed the pipes with the coolent lid off and left it running for about 15mins.

well matt and andy did, me n yoof were in maccy d's filling our faces.

The heater controls need to be set to fully hot so that you drain the heater matrix too. You'll probably have an air lock or two in there, as well as perhaps not having drained all the water you flushed it with out?

Run it for a bit with the expansion tank cap off, whilst squeezing the raditator hoses. Go careful not to burn yourself - but you might find that it needs a fair bit of topping up after doing that.

You didnt take the water pump out so the engine would have still been full of coolant

so all fairly normal then..... is it ok to do what i've done and run it through with water off a garden hose, then put in a (pretty much pointless, i guess!) litre of distilled stuff and a litre of antifreeze?

or should i drain some of it out (non-mouth syphon or something?) and put more antifreeze in?

squeezed the pipes for all im worth, had the bleed screw not just open but removed (and liquid gushing out totally bubble free), bounced up and down on the bumper etc, run it a little while but havent been able to get it hot yet - it was in the garage with the air cleaner etc in bits, so i started to choke.

was thinking of doing the running-til-its-hot-with-cap-off-then-top-up thing, seeing as thats also a suggestion here i think it's a winner

...and off i go

monday night.......

worked a treat (thanks!!) though i got a couple of mild scalds and sent probably altogether too much boiling (!) coolant onto the roadway when the odd misplaced hose squeeze or overfill (and later, engine rev-up) caused the hot stuff to overpressure and bubble out.

once it seemed all the bubbles were gone however and it needed no more topping (took a hell of a long time! put a good 2.5 litres extra into it, no bottle left unopened now and 4 are in the bin) the fan came on the once, probably from the thermo pinging open for the first time ever and sending a deluge of 110'c water to the radiator (i was seconds from killing the engine out of concern, when it whirred into life), and after that the temperature remained pretty much constant... at 90-95-100 degrees, mainly around lower 90s.

then let it cool, saw that the level properly sank, and topped it up gently to a little below "max" on the expansion tank when fully cold.

sweet sweet success! gonna get it from home, give it a run this week, see if it can keep 90s or at least 80s on a motorway trip. everything is hunky dory but for the compression/oil usage and radio aerial now. engine even sounds to be running quieter/smoother than it has done for a while... yay!

will have to see what the power/response is like when it's at 90 degrees however - it seemed distinctly sluggish, warm and rich when the temp was soaring... connecting/disconnecting the sensor having very little effect if any!