What a mess, or how not to remove the coolant bridge.

[Danglerb]

Last week I pulled the center "body" of my intake and throttle to clean out the valley from a nasty oil leak, that I think precipitated the bushing failure and replacement of the timing belt the week before.

Clearly some coolant needs to be drained out, but no lifts have been open until today and somebody put a hex head 10mm bolt in the radiator instead of the drain plug (and used a fine thread so a stock drain plug will never fit). Crawling under the car I couldn't get any purchase on the bolt head with a wrench or a socket due to larger size of the hex head touching one side of the belly pan attachment frame. Today I got it in the air and worked off the hex head bolt using an open end wrench turned sideways, but my plan to drain just a couple quarts didn't pan out.

Some went in the pan, but wow can coolant splash a long ways. Next I removed the radiator and other hoses, and discovered that half a gallon wasn't even close to enough coolant to drain out.

Pulling off the bridge I learned the heart of my mistake, draining coolant from the radiator leaves a LOAD in the heads which needs to be drained from the block. Roughly I am guessing a gallon in the drain pan, a gallon on the floor, and a gallon on me and the mechanic helping me. Yuck I hate spilled coolant.

All in all a good day.

I picked up a Bosch cordless impact driver on clearance at Home Depot half price $99, finished assembling my econo wire set and found and replaced one bad spark plug thing, and main bit is that everything is now pretty much cleaned and ready for assembly tomorrow.

Plan is that I pick up a 7/16 x 1/2" long coarse thread stainless steel hex drive bolt in the morning and use that with an oring to seal up the radiator drain.

I hope I can get most of the coolant washed off somehow. I hate the smell of a coolant leak.