Not got a lot done on my Hippo recently - largely thanks to work schedules and last week being half term. I have bought a replacement front ABS sensor and a Yaw sensor, so hopefully will be able to get rid of the intermittent appearance of the three Amigos. My neighbour has taken delivery of a set of Magnecor HT leads which should, I hope, help eliminate the intermittent misfire. And I need to replace the poor quality Bearmach drop link on the offside front, which has knocked from the day I fitted it (argh!)
But the weekend took a rather different course to what I had expected (I had planned to get working on the above job list).
Saturday was a lovely day, so I took off the hard top, and drove with the family to gawp at the new Discovery 5. Blimey, it's HUGE. I know it isn't meant to be much larger than the Disco 3/4, but it looks it. And the inside is commodious. In HSE Lux trim, it is a lovely place to sit...
Anyway, day dreaming to one side, the Hippo must have been intimidated by it's newer brethren, because when we got back to Muswell Hill from Barnet, on stopping the engine, there was this odd bubbling noise from the right windscreen base. I popped the bonnet to discover the source of the noise was bubbles of coolant being ejected into an empty coolant bottle.
K-series engine.
Predictable thought: oh no, has the head gasket gone again??!??!
Put some water in it, bleed it and drove it home. Parked it up, and couldn't face further investigation until the next day...
So Sunday was spent scratching my head: had I done something wrong during the head rebuild? It's got a good quality head gasket (Payen "blue"), the head had been peened and skimmed and I'd corrected all the mistakes made by a previous "mechanic". I couldn't think what could have gone wrong: there was no coolant in the oil (spotless), and no sign of external water leakage.
On re-bleeding the cooling system, some horrid gunge came through the by pass pipe. Black debris - may be lime scale? Slight oily residue on the surface of the coolant.
I re-bleed a few times. Ran the engine. Took it out for several test drives, really gunning through the revs (which the K-series in a Freelander doesn't enjoy as much as the same engine in the MG). Basically abusing it to see whether I could get it to loose coolant again.
Basically it hasn't lost anything.
Running the engine with the heater on full and the fan speed set at 2 is sufficient to keep the engine temperature under control when the vehicle is stationary. Turning the heater valve off leads to the usual fluctuating temperature: a slight fluctuation in the coolant level in the expansion tank:it goes up a fraction when hot, associated with an increase in the coolant pressure, as felt through the "hardness" of the upper radiator hose to squeezing and then falls again when the radiator fan brings the temperature down again.
It's odd. The expansion tank is holding pressure, and there seems to be no excess pressurisation with high revs (a sure-fire sign of fire ring failure - the only potential source of water loss I can think of here). The only thing I can imagine the problem might be is that there was an air lock with some old gunge - perhaps related to an earlier head gasket failure - that has randomly been dislodged and run through. And the appearance of the particles of crud in the expansion tank may fit with this.
What I need to do is to flush the system through. Perhaps with some detergent? Then re-fill with fresh coolant/antifreeze.
My family thinks that the Hippo was trying to fight back at the thought of being traded in for a Discovery! LOL Little chance of that me thinks...