HELP!! Too Hot

I have a 77 2.7, I took it to Midas muffler today to get the exhaust checked. When it was up on the hoist the exhaust was bright red. This is where the exhaust comes out of the bottom of the engine and runs into the heat shield for the heat exchangers.

The oil temp was 210. And it was only around 8 degrees outside, I'm in Canada.And the car was only running for 10-15 minutes.

What causes this too run so hot? I know a hot engine can be caused by too rich a mixture, can this be it? Mine has CIS though?

Also I'm not even sure if this is a factory exhaust! From the engine it looks like Headers. There are 3 pipes on either side, from the exhaust ports on the engine and combine into one pipe that goes under the heat shield mentioned above??? Is this real??Please help.

Shawn

Sounds like there is some kind of major problem somewhere. I have not had that much experiece with P-cars per-se, but I can tell you that it takes a great deal of heat to get headers to glow. My thoughts are following.
1) a rich condition will make your exhaust gasses colder, not hotter (unless you are having combustion in the header). If you are that lean, you need to correct is before you burn a piston. It is possible that you could be lean only on the idle circuit also.
2) you may have some kind of restriciton in the exhaust causing back pressure (i.e. clogged catalytic). that would also cause heat buildup. Does your car pull ok upwards of 4000 rpm?
3) If you have only headers, where are you getting your interior heat from? Do you have good heat inside?

Good luck... keep us posted on the solution..

I'm no exhaust guru but the last vehicle I owned that had those symptoms had a major block in the cat. converter. I'm not sure what the emission restrictions are where you are located but I may try the simplest thing first and determine whether there is some kind of blockage in the exhaust system. Good luck with it.

Rich

DO you have a Termo reactor on that car? It is an odd looking tube-canister that runs alonside the bottom right "header". If you do..GET IT OFF OF THERE!!!! To sell porsches in the carter era, german engineers tried this crazy method of baking exhaust gases with an extreme "thermal reaction" of heat. Hence the name. If your car doesn't have it on the engine, then I would check your smog injectors. Your pump will have lines running down to the Heads--NEAR THE EXHAUST opening from the head itself. These injectors get caked with nasty black sut (sp?)...Some have said they get clogged--then hot---then the injector tip will snap off inside the head..I've never seen it..but doesn't that say something about the heat in that area?
Good Luck...check other things while your down there!!!.............

Thanks you all for the replies so far. I am going to take the exhaust system right off, and see if there is a clog or something.

I am also going to try to get a picture scanned to show exactly what the system looks like.

I hope I haven't damaged anything yet, the car still runs fine, I has low power under 3000 RPMs, but I'm not sure if its related??

I will keep posting what I find out

Thanks again

Shawn

You may be having an ignition timing malfunction. If the distributor's timing advance mechanism is stuck at full advance it would produce symptoms such as you are experiencing.

Thanks for the tip on the ignition timing too. Is there a way to check this? Would there be any other symptoms besides the heat? I need to figure this out.

Thanks everyone

Shawn

If the advance is indeed stuck open your car would detonate under accelleration. This and the extreme heat would occur quickly after starting and driving the car. The car should also be hard to start when cold. Performance would also suffer at the low and middle range and the engine would run hot (oil temp). I would think at 8F the car would warm up very slowly if at all. A very lean condition can also show these symptoms. I have no experience with smog equipment but '77 CIS doesn't have Lambda so I don't know how it could go lean all at once unless someone hit your enrichment screw. These systems usually error on the rich side (which is good). If you have an oclusion in your exhaust you would experience poor performance throughout the RPM range. Hey Warren - you wanna get in on this?

Thanks Again

Scott about the heat inside, there is none. I am going to get it checked to see if the fuel/air mixture is good, ensure that it is not burning too rich or too lean.

I am also going to take the exhaust apart to see if there is a blockage. Actually I am in the process of getting a good used exhaust for it, so I'll wait till then. I just won't drive it, or at least not for long times.

So I'll sumarize, it should be either a blocked exhaust or fuel/air mixture? Any other possibilities?

Shawn